మారాటెరడిదిగాద్లకాపెరోడియలినికందారొారనూయందికారినికికికికికాటారెటూయారినికియా. 26 day in the month of April 2022 with a very very powerful revelation message to the former president of the nation of Zambia this distinguished excellency Edga Chagwa Mungu the losses is not finished with you yet and so I have tagged this the second coming of Edga Chagwa Mungu now I believe that wherever you are you are going to get this message you are going to get this video number one today 26 day early morning the Lord said speak directly first encourage him because he still is the chosen one of Zambia a soul is never a David a David is never a soul God's program can be interrupted delayed but can never be stopped your case is like good luck Jonathan of Nigeria in 2015 when I said this is one God I have chosen let him finish his work but you know sometimes even in the will of God there can be an interruption now we are proceeding into a new election in Nigeria in 2023 the same people that cost good luck Jonathan three days ago they said we want you back we are suffering please come back come and deliver Nigeria and they go to his office with billboard and poster said you must campaign for the next election that is coming up in February 2023 so now the one that they have cost and say we don't want not all the people they are the one they are coming back to now the law says you tell the former president of Zambia do not forget the vision of 2016 when I told you I saw you on the mountain and the law said this is the one I have chosen now the law says you tell the excellence that just like in Nigeria a certain thing is going to happen yes I know there are some people when they hear this video they say oh PF profit not about the issue of PF there is no PF in this issue just like it happen in Nigeria it is going to happen in Zambia what happen in Nigeria in Nigeria at that time they said there was a wind of change but I said it is not a change a change so certain things are going to happen and I am going to specify on two one your excellence there is a time that is coming in Zambia and I am not speaking about to anybody specifically I am speaking to you there is a time that is coming the people of Zambia they are going to call out for you they say sir the way things are going we don't like it please we want you to run again it is going to happen it is a prophecy mark it in your calendar put it in your diary sir certain things are going to happen it may not happen for now like it is not happening in Nigeria in the beginning but after a time when eyes begin to open then they say we can see the burst and we can see now and we believe that you need to come out now some people come out and say in the past oh you are corrupt the corruption build the hospitals the corruption the so called corruption put the roads put the fertilizer put money in the pockets stabilize the petroleum prices number two the laws I should speak to you sir when they come because now in 2020 2022 it may not look like it look at it like it now but I am telling you they say come come in when they come the people of Zambia when they cry for your return because now you may say oh I am not interested no it happens like that even it happens with Jonathan when they come give it a thought don't say no because the law says they interrupted interruption does not mean abolition destruction nullification God says I have not finished my assignment over in the nation of Zambia through you and there is going to be a second coming I want you to take note in the nation of Zambia certain things will lead to certain things that will cause people to say how it was economic wise financial wise petroleum wise resources wise money in the pocket wise infrastructure wise love of God respect for prayers and the tears of the Holy Spirit we want you again sir they are going to come number three don't be distracted by people's words insult or whatever people say be focused be what be focus even me they will call me neighbor it doesn't matter because they did that in Nigeria but I was not bothered so there is a second coming of Edgar Lungu and I am not saying whatever the party he wants to do they should not do it but I am telling you there is a second coming the laws actually encourage you and the laws still cause you the chosen one you are the chosen one man people may say things may even say it's over for you you may even think it's over for you the laws actually tell you sir it's not over I am telling you what I am I am led to prophesy say to him encourage him they will also be encouraged when that time comes finally let me round up on that when that time comes they may want to place barrier obstacle they may even try to bring up some things against you that time but it can't stop you moving train of the Lord there is a second coming there is an unfinished business of God through the distinguished personality Edgar Chagwan Mungu it happened in Nigeria eyes open is coming to happen in the nation of Zambia a soul is not a David a David is never a soul shalom shalom and be blessed nation of Zambia 26th day month of April 2022


First of all, like Tejesh mentioned, I work at Niranjo. I am also part of the Bandar core team. And today, I want to talk about how to build resilient systems, which is useless, although. So I guess it got tangled. So today, I want to talk about how to build resilient systems. So why do we care about resilient systems in the first place? So if anyone who loses sleep over their systems downtime or any customers or business, they would care about resiliency of their system. Because downtime would probably mean, would be disasters for them. And probably some developers would have to wake up at night to answer the on-call. That is one. So you would want to build systems that in case of failures or a very high traffic, it would still work. It would still perform. And hence, we do care about resilient systems. So how do we go about building one? So let's move away from software for a bit now. Let's say about cars. You have a car. Those are very resilient when an accident occurs. Like it would have an airbag system. And it would kick in and save your life. Nuclear power reactors. If the power goes out, it doesn't just start leaking radiation all over. There would be mechanisms to build it. Do you think those guys build that mechanism once the nuclear power plant was entirely built? It started, it was working.  Do we have handle that case? No, they would have thought about it from the start. But unfortunately, in software resilience, the way the things it works is folks built the entire feature. Everything is done. Luckily, if it's in the QS state, someone would get the idea, oh, what if that gas server that we are highly relying upon to meet our SLS service level agreement? Well, what if it goes down? If you realize you didn't handle that, then that's too late. Most of the time you realize all of this while it's on production. Once a fine day, when you actually need your caches to be working, when your load on your server is extremely high, that's when you would want it to perform its best. That's when the cache server would actually go down. And when it goes down, some devs would get fired. But the rest of who remains would have to handle all that carnage. So the only way to design our resilience system is from the start. You have to begin with resilience in mind. While designing, you have to think about, OK, what if my service I'm talking to goes down? What if my database does not respond? Or what if there's a bad query running on my database? All those things you have to think. And a lot of things, while I'm going to talk about patterns that can help you with, a lot of things are very domain-specific. Those are things that you have to plan out in advance that you can handle in code. So yes, so coming to it. This is going to be the main crux of the talk, resilient design patterns. So while I don't say the guarantee that you, using this design patterns would guarantee that your core machine will not go down every time, but it will reduce, it will improve your systems uptime considerably. So let me give an example why you would want design patterns over a one-time solution. So we had a system in production. Over a period of time, the memory usage of that, we had Unicorn as our web server. Over a period of time, the Unicorn web server's memory usage would increase, like day by day. And by a week or two, the memory usage would be so high that it would start swapping. And at that point, the only option you would have is to restart the web server. And so that was very painful. So while looking at why this was happening, we had a lot of things like, OK, maybe it's one of the native extensions in Ruby, which is leaking the memory. We didn't find anything. We thought, OK, are we creating symbols anywhere? We checked. We were only doing JSON parsing. And that was the only time we were creating symbols. And generally, you would know that most of the times when you parse a JSON, the keys would be non-unique. So that's a better option. So let me just add that those who are new to Ruby, in Ruby, till Ruby 2.2, we just came out on this 25th December, it would never garbage collected symbols. So if you create a symbol in Ruby, it would remain till you kill the process. So it's like you can't just keep creating symbols and expect things to work fine. So what we found out eventually was that at one place where we were parsing JSON, there were non-unique keys, which were timestamps. And every time we were parsing this JSON, we were converting it to symbol. And that was increasing the memory usage. And it was not happening very frequently. But when you add one or two weeks time period, the memory usage would start as well. But till then, to actually solve this problem, you would need knowledge of Ruby's symbol. You need to familiar with your code base. You need to know that, OK, I'm parsing JSON here. And there is a non-unique JSON key. There is a unique JSON key coming every single time when I get the response from this server. All that knowledge might not be possible if the project is very large. You might never know that part of the code base. So till then, to make sure that no customer actually got impacted, we had bounded the memory of each worker. We had something like Monit, which would monitor each worker. And if its memory usage increased a certain threshold, we would kill that worker and restart it. That way, even though we had plenty of time to look for the error to find the root cause, the business was not impacted. And I think this is what design patterns are all about. It's like, till you exactly know what the problem is, you won't lose sleep over it. And you would have sufficient time to do it. If we didn't do that, somebody would have had to be online every time the memory, it would start hitting this web. So these are the patterns I would be covering today. Let's just begin with the very first one, bounding. So in bounding, let's start with timeouts. How many of you know the, like just raise your hands, how many of you know the natural HTTP default timeout in Ruby? Like no one? They are keynote speakers. So it's 60 seconds. Like it's 60 seconds by default. A lot of Ruby HTTP clients are built over this natural HTTP library, which comes with MRI by default. So they're also 60 seconds. Whatever active record connection pool. Say, what's the timeout to get a connection from a connection pool? Like does anyone know that number? Like no one this time. That's five seconds. So what you realize is this timeouts are very high. Having this timeouts on a production system under load would be very bad. I think in the fail-fast pattern, I'll explain why this is a very bad behavior to have. But generally, a lot of systems' default timeouts are very high. But the sad part is there are a lot of things in your operating systems that does not have timeouts by default. Like we, again, there was one software where its job was to pick up all the messages from the services and push it to our main queue. Now, this service was very strange because it would, after two, three weeks, it would actually get hung. It would just stop working. And there would be critical impact because of it because messages were not getting delivered to the other service. When we went down, like we, using GDB and printing out stack rails by trapping a signal, we found out that it happened that it was getting blocked on socket.send. So in Ruby, socket.send is a blocking call. We were using a UDP socket, which is fire and forget if you still remember. So generally, when you send anything on UDP, it doesn't wait for a response. It's instantaneous. But UDP has a buffer. And when that buffer is full, if you don't have any timeouts or if you're not sending in non-blocking way, the dot send would block permanently till someone actually goes down and I mean restarts it or something like that. And because we were so to this one bug, and this was something we used to collect matrices and analyze them later. So something that would actually just be for reporting or something was blocking the main feature of the software which was sending messages. So use timeouts. Evaluate each and every timeout in your system. And depending on your service, maybe the acceptable timeout is only 10 seconds. But it wouldn't never be 60 seconds. Second point is bounding. Like one I've already talked about is memory bounding. Like check your worker process. Check your that if after certain threshold you probably want some kind of behavior. Maybe restart or maybe clear the memory. So that is one. And finally I would say in bounding I would say about this bounding your buffers and your queues.  And the sad part of this queues are you have zero control over those queues. So you can't do anything if this queue for a form. Instead the better approach would be to have very restrictive buffer sizes for this. And then have your own queue, your own bounded queue for that. Once you have your own bounded queue, you are in control of it. You can easily say apply back pressure. Basically tell the other service which is sending all the message that, hey I am completely old or that, please don't send me more messages or send them at a slower pace. Or you can process those messages differently. But that is something you would only know if you know how many messages are there in your queue. And if it's somewhere in your UDP buffer or it's somewhere there in your Mutex queue, you would never figure out that how many messages are there to process. Second pattern is circuit breakers. So circuit breakers are one of the patterns popularized by Michael Nigard in his book, Release It. They are amazing patterns. It's really sad that a lot of folks don't know anything about it. So let me explain this based on the diagram. So you're talking to your client. Their circuit breaker is just an intermediate thing that sends to the supplier.  Everything works. But now let's say there is some connection problem or the other supplier is overwhelmed. So what's happening is while sending the request, it's timing out. You have set your time out because now you're following use time out. So you have time out of say two seconds. It's not giving you a response in two seconds. So you're timing out. And then you're sending that error back to client. In this case, any decent circuit breaker implementation would have a fallback mechanism. In case you would call that fallback, the fallback could be a static content, your cache or anything like that. Or it could be not be implemented. Whatever it is, it would time out. After a certain time, it would realize that you would have set a certain threshold of failure for that API. You would say, okay, in last 10 minutes, it should fail for 30% of the time. If you breach that limit, it would not even, the circuit would trip and it would go in the open state. In this case, you would not even bother calling the other server. This has two advantages. One is you're not wasting timing out to a service which is failing more time than you desire. Second, that other service might be overwhelmed and by sending your request there, you are essentially d-dossing that service, which is both the things that you wouldn't want. And this is like the very bare minimum of service circuit breakers. After a certain time, what you can do with your circuit breaker is you can move them to a half open state where you would try making calls to the service. If those calls succeed, you can again go back to the initial closed state where everything is fine or if things are still not okay, you can remain open and not make the call to that services. Actually, circuit breakers are not just used to talk with other services. Elastic search makes users of circuit breakers. Basically, if you are executing really bad queries in elastic search and those queries are reaching the time limit that you have set via a certain threshold, it will open the circuit for that query and it won't even execute that query. Every time you, in your code, that tries to execute that query, it will raise an exception saying that, look, this query is taking a lot of time and we are not even going to execute it. But this, you save the, so the other queries in your system can still go ahead. In MySQL, there's nothing like that. So in MySQL, if you have a lot of queries running which are taking time, it will steal all the resources from the queries, the other queries that should be executing. And generally, if you can ask any DevOps or Linux admin, in this case, probably he would have to go to MySQL, look at MySQL process list and kill those queries one by one. So the other queries can start executing. So circuit breakers are even used in databases. And yeah, for implementation of circuit breakers, what I really recommend, if any one of you is using JRuby, I highly recommend you use Histrix by Netflix. It's a Java library. With JRuby, you can easily use it inside your Ruby code. But if you are on MRI, there is a circuit breaker gem. But frankly, it's not as battle tested as the Netflix Histrix library. So yeah, fail fast. So now, in both the previous points, I've been mentioning that you should be failing fast. That failing fast is much better than taking time to do it. Why is that? So I'm just going to need some math for this. So this is Lytl's law, which comes under a queuing theory. So your length of a queue depends on how many messages are arriving and how much time your system is taking to process them. So now think about it. Like, if you're not failing fast, and there's something wrong with your server or the service you're talking to, your mean time in the system is going to short up. It's going to be very high, which means your length of the queue is going to increase over time. So I have a perfect example for this. Say you are running a business of, you know, you offer eBooks for download.  Once the payment has been accepted, it goes, the payment service actually tries to approve the payment, and then you get the downloading. So buy the book, pay, payment gets approved, and you get the downloading. Now let's say the payment approved is talking to some credit card company servers and that is down. So by the time it's down and you're not failing fast, what's going to happen is there's going to be a queue buildup till that point. And let's say it took one hour for them to get the service up. Now, once the service is up, unless the response times were really, really fast, what's going to happen is, I mean, if the response times are really, really fast compared to the arrival rate, what's going to happen is the folks who are ordering anything now will actually get the order after one hour or whatever the delay is in that system. So say, so that's a very bad experience because on any eBook site, what you see is like once you purchase the book, it would take one minute for the download link to appear. And you're breaching those promises every single time. The customer might never even come back and buy things from your site. But let's say you believe in failing fast.  So every time we try contacting that other credit card service, it fails, and you have a circuit breaker implemented, you go to fallback and in fallback, the only thing you do is you push that message to a different retry queue or something and say, okay, I'll retry this message later and you clear it from the main message. What does this do is when the service gets out, the people who are placing orders at that moment will actually get it right then and there, like the one minute time that you have promised. And those folks who did not get it in one minute, you can send them a mail because you can say, okay, all the messages in the retry queue are the ones where I actually preach my promise that I promise in one minute and you can send them a mail saying, okay, because of technical difficulties, it's going to take some time and you can also process those messages. So again, if you have noticed in three patterns, what I'm trying to convey is control. What you get here is control. Instead of allowing your operating system or someone else to have the control, it's better that you have the control because you understand your domain logic. You know, if you have an e-book buying website, you would want to have the control to send apology mails or not. Having said that, there is one thing that I really want to show you is this one second. So this is queuing theory and because there was a capacity talk just before this, I just want to quickly show you that how you can actually use queuing theory to do amazing things. So say, let's say you have a single queue. Basically, you have a website where you're getting all your messages from. You have C servers. So let's say C servers would be 15, 20 servers. You would want, you're getting 100 customers per minute, 100 requests per minute and your rate is around 15. You can process 15 requests per minute per server and you have 20 servers like this. This tells you what is your average type of customer, how many customers you serve in a minute. It tells you your load average, which is zero because this number is really high because there are a number of, so let me reduce it. So yeah, so average waiting for each customer to actually get your product is 37.0037 minute. It also gives you entire graph about how much time it has to wait. It can really help you with the capacity planning. So yeah, so going back. There's something called a bulkhead. The bulkhead design pattern actually comes from ships. So if you look at any modern ship below deck, there would be, they would be compartmentalized completely. The reason why they do this is, say your ship meets with an accident and water flows through it because it's completely compartmentalized, the water won't invade the other parts of the system. So even if this one part of the system is down, it does not take out the entire boat with it. And this is the same in services. See, you have two services, A and B, and they talk to service C. Now, unfortunately, the service C goes down. Both A and B making requests to C are also down. And because now A and B are down, service depending on them would also go down.  So in this case, this is something that you clearly don't desire. But let's say you use the bulkhead pattern. You have server C, some of the dedicated servers, dedicated for service A, and some are dedicated to service B. For good measures, see, their physical loads don't also go down. So you have put them on different regions of AWS. So with this, even if service A portion of service C goes down, other services will be still be up because of redundancy that you have introduced. However, bulkheads are not just for services. It could be applied to your single machine as well. So say you have a machine and you have multiple threads running. You can pin a certain thread group to a core and other threads to other core. So even if those threads, that part of the service which is using those threads, start to get overloaded, it won't at least make use of other cores. It will only use the cores that it's pinned to. And that way, even though some part of your machine is constantly busy, the other parts are still able to serve requests. And that is what the bulkhead pattern is. And finally, the last pattern that I want to talk about is specifications. Specifications are something that I feel a lot of folks have realized that they are not important. But I think Leslie Lampert gave an amazing talk last year called Thinking for Programmers. You should definitely watch it if you haven't. In specifications, what he says, before you write any code, you write the specification in a stateful manner. So you have a function that takes an argument A and it changes that A to some state B. And if you document that you've write this before you do it, you would realize that how sloppy your thinking is. Because what happens is that whenever a person thinks about a case before, when he starts coding, he only, at most, he's only going to think about the happy case when everything is working fine. He would never consider the cases when something might be wrong with the system. So with the specification, once you write this down that this is what I want, you realize that you haven't thought about a lot of cases inside your system. And then that's when you realize that you need to think about the not so happy case. So one of the quotes that I have to say is that by Michael Nagat, the software design, only talks about what systems should do, not what systems should not do. And because we only address, if we only think about the happy path case, I can assure you when on production when you actually encounter a scenario that you didn't think about, things won't go well, you have, you need to think about it. This is before you write any sort of code because even if you do TDD, the amount of tests coverage that you would actually do is based on scenarios that you have thought of. If you haven't thought about a problem well, if you don't really understand any code, understand the problem that you're trying to solve completely, no matter what patterns or whatever you lose, you will never be able to write a good code that would actually solve it. And finally, just putting all together all these patterns, I would highly recommend that, if there is one pattern that you can start with, I would recommend that you start with specification.  But I digress that even the smallest service today is a distributed system. You, at least in the worst case, would have a database running on a different server. And you would be communicating through network. And as we all know, the network is not as reliable as we want. So I would say that at least put some of those patterns in practice. I think you can ask any developer who has been on call for a long time. It's not a really amazing thing to be on. So yeah, that's it. That's my, and here are the references. I'll upload with slides. So if you want to know more.


The second important principle is the non-autological ethics. The ontological ethics is associated with the idea that human beings should be treated with dignity and respect because they have rights. This is kind of a positive principle and it has a lot of positive implications as well that we should treat human subjects with a lot of dignity and respect. Another concept is that there are objective obligations or duties which is required by all the people to do. When they face an ethical situation in which they are not able to understand what duty they have to perform and what duty they have to compromise where decision making comes becomes a crucial situation. Let me give you an example. For instance, there is a manager who always wanted to reach to his duty on time. He never compromises. If he wants to reach 9 o'clock, he always reaches 9 o'clock. In some circumstances, there comes another situation in which there is a lot of blockage and rough traffic in the traffic. It is very difficult to reach 9 o'clock on time. Either he is going to breach the traffic rules and he will reach there on time because it is a principle and it is an ethical duty that he should be there on time or either he is going to follow the traffic rules in which situation he can breach the traffic rules whereas the traffic rules do not apply to our emergency. In this situation, the pathological ethics play a very crucial role in identifying which situation we have to fulfill our duty completely and which duty we can reach. For instance, if we talk about the rights of confidentiality, then if we apply this principle of denotology on it, then we can understand that if there is an individual who has psychological traits, he is telling his family that I am going to kill someone. I am going to behead someone. I am going to do some disaster in the state. So is it necessary to maintain his confidentiality? If someone goes to a consultant, a counsellor, a psychiatrist and after taking treatment, he tells his intentions, then is confidentiality's right important there or is it more important to protect a human life of a state's welfare? So in some situations, we know that confidentiality could be breached as well. Now, where we have problems in the minority, where we have issues in the minority, we have to take decisions for their welfare and their stake. So this is very crucial to understand. The denotological class of ethical theory states that people should adhere to their obligations and duties when engaged in decision making, when ethics are in play. So this is important that we look at ethical principles, side by side, the ethical theory we are applying, it is important to understand the implications of our decisions. For instance, it is very important for a doctor to do his practice ethically. But if he is exposed to a disease or a virus because of a disease, he should not perform his duties in those circumstances. Like if a COVID specialist is giving treatment to patients, but he becomes COVID himself, then he will not give treatment to patients because it is important for him to quarantine himself. So in this situation, this is very important to understand the individual set of duties. Let's look at the limitations. Limitations of the denotology contains many positive attributes as well and it contains flaws as well. For instance, the main challenge is which come to a researcher is perspective. In which situation we are implying it? Perspective, connotation, context, these are very important things while making decisions in which situation we are applying which rules. First, there is an argument rationale on logical basis about the principle involved in decision making about individual duties like I have just given an example of a doctor. Second important issue is sometimes a person's duties are in conflict. These challenges are definitely defined by the ones that it should be considered when relying on this as an ethical system. In other words, you can take a good and better decision by putting ethical principles in front of you. Third is that that implications of the making a right choice is a bad consequence. Sometimes a researcher chooses that whatever decision he is making is his right choice but due to his lack of competency and lack of understanding his bad consequences come in front of him. So there is another thing that whatever theoretical foundation you are following you are well equipped and well knowledged and you know how to use your ethical principle. It is exactly like a researcher chooses a research design and he sees how to do his sampling and how to take his research design. Similarly, we have to follow ethical principles as well as crucial decisions. However, despite these concerns many have found that denotogical has the strongest model for applied in public relation because it is giving welfare and it is giving positive benefits to the larger community so in public relations it is considered as a good theoretical option. Maybe in any business model we see that this is a flop theory but if we look at it in the performance of public service then this can be a good theory. A key thought in this concept is the assumption that these need to be some objective models that professionals rely on in order to determine ethical behaviors. So basically the context, the need the situation in which we are going to conduct that research that really, really very crucial to decision making. The same thing that might be ethical in a business model can be in the perspective of a social welfare that it is not so ethical. On its basis decision making is very important and it can gauge the results of the ethical theories that are following.


Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Unfiltered, Pastor. Again, always good having you here. Oh, thank you, John. Today, Pastor, I wanted to talk about it seems like everybody around and even people in our church going through financial difficulties due to inflation, gas prices. I wouldn't put gas at my car the other day and I couldn't believe it's so expensive. Is this your way of asking for a raise or what? Oh, that was my angle. In front of everybody? That was my in. Not good, John. And you know, with rent and mortgages, people can't even move or it's just difficult all the way around, Pastor. And the economy is plummeted and unemployment is high. And you know, this is not a podcast on economics, but this is by dynamics in its finest form. And you know, and for us people in the church or the person that's sitting in the pew every Sunday or on Wednesdays, as a pastor, how would you talk about getting through these financial difficulties? You know, we've always had financial situations. The church has never been without them. I mean, from the very beginning, when we look at the Book of Acts, it speaks concerning the fact that there were members of the body of Christ who had nothing or very little. And so the church, because these were members of the church, these are people who were fully involved, servants and all. They weren't people who would just drop in and say, can you help me? These are people who actually were recognized people in the fellowship who would go through needs. And so what happened at that time is the fellowship would work together to help those. There was nobody in need. The scripture says in the Book of Acts, right? And so from the very beginning, there's been difficult financial times, especially under persecution when people were being driven out of their cities that they dwelt in and losing their occupations and all. This is something that the Book of Acts chronicles in many places and points out that there were those within the confines of the church who would be like a barn of a soothed property, donated it, and gave it for the well-being of those in need. And Paul has given us various scriptures related to meeting urgent needs and things of that nature. So how do we deal with that? We've always had to deal with that. When Paul was writing to Corinthians, he said, there are not many noble amongst you. There are not many wealthy. There are not many mighty. There are not many people who are of the higher financial streams in your fellowship. So what do you do? Well, you learn to live with what you have, by and large. That's something that I, as a boy, growing into a man had to learn from my father and his example. You don't spend money. You don't have. You don't go places. You can't afford. You learn to do with what you have and you do the best that you can. You do something that many of us do. You budget. You put away this for that, and you live the best that you can. And if it means you don't live in the way that you'd like, having a nicer home or a better car, which is, there's nothing wrong with the desire for either of those. It's just living within your means and doing what you can and seeking the Lord as you're faithful to him as you serve him. And I had to learn that myself, and I still practice that, John. When our church first was birthed, we didn't have, the old saying is two nickels to rub together. We didn't. We had a house payment. We had a vehicle payment, insurance, upkeep, gasoline. You name it. We had all that. We still do. We have different payments we make. And I learned very early to live on what I had, not on what I wish I had. And so I don't know that we can ever really look to man to provide for us. I certainly don't believe that we should be those who go to the world to say, support us. We need to go first and foremost to the Lord and seek him. We need to check our hearts to see where we really stand with him. Those are things that are prerogatives. And we need to do with what we do have. And I don't look to the government as being the one who's supplying my needs. My God shall supply all my need according to His riches and mercy in Christ. So I rely on the goodness of the Lord and the faithfulness of God's people. People don't understand that pastors, if they're full-time servants of the Lord, they actually rely on the generous support or the faithful giving of those whom they serve. For some reason, this stereotype of every pastor apparently being a thief or somebody who's living better than the average person and all of that, that there are some who do. There's no doubt about that. But not all do. Overwhelming majority of pastors understand what financial need is. And we have to rely on the Lord. We have to trust in him. When COVID hit, the bills didn't stop. And people don't realize that churches like ours, while we have a number of upkeep needs, we have a number of people who rely on finances that are donated to live on. They gave up their secular work to serve here. And so we paid these people with salary. And just because COVID came didn't mean that our mortgages didn't have to be paid or food wasn't having to be put on a table. So what did we do? We did what we do. We trusted the Lord and God has always been faithful and he supplies. And so I don't rely on Bidenomics because that's just a catchphrase that when looked upon with closely, looked at closely, you can see this is a charade. The prices have gone up. By poor decisions that this man in his cabinet, I don't even think he makes the decisions. I believe he has progressives who tell him what to do. I mean, just the other day was on TV saying, this is what I've been told to do.  So he gives it away all the time. This is a man who's not in control of anything, including himself. As a result of that, I can't look to him to strategize something to help me because he's moving us to socialism. And so no socialist who's at the top ever is hungry or ever needs a ride. They always make the money off the people who have to suffer. So I don't look to man. I look to God. Amen. Well, thank you, pastor, for sharing that. Because I know there's people in our pews that are even wondering where we're going to get our next meal from. And they're turning to the Lord. And the amazing thing about the Lord is he's undefeated. He always supplies our need according to his riches. We need to understand that. We learn to walk by faith and not by sight. And if you see someone with an urgent need, the body of Christ will meet that. Amen. Well, thank you guys for tuning in. We do want to invite you to our Sunday morning services at 8.30 and 10.45. And pastor, you're going through the book of Acts chapter 10. Yeah, I'm going to do my best. It's been a rich study. So I'll invite you, your friends and family to come join us. We look forward to having you guys. God bless you. Pastor David, again, thank you for your time. We'll see you guys soon.


I made friends with a girl from Niagara Falls, and I met her when I was stationed at HMCS Star in Hamilton. And she used to take me home to her home on weekends in Niagara Falls, because I remember they had grapes hanging over their kitchen and everything. It was just a lovely, lovely spot, and she and I kept corresponded right up until recent years. She's no longer with us, unfortunately. And we traveled to New York together, and she was just one of these people that we just clicked right from the start. We had a lot in common. We loved music and travel and interesting things. She was a very interesting person.


Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Teach up at BSU in the music department. My name is Greg Gaston and the rest of the group is Kevin Daly from Minneapolis on electric guitar. Eric Sundine adjunct professor of percussion at BSU on mallet cat midi mallet controller. John Stewart who plays keyboards and Lee Foster who plays electric bass. I think Greg and I kind of met in the hallway one day and I'm pretty sure that I came up to you and said that I had heard a pretty well-known classical trumpet player playing a Bach cello suite on electronic wind instrument, which is what I play. And I said, Greg, this is so cool.  You haven't seen that yet? No, I'm kidding a little bit. But anyway, so we got to talking about it and decided that it would be fun to put together both a faculty group and a student group. And what is the name of reference to? The technology that we use is called midi, M-I-D-I, and it stands for musical instrument digital interface. But what I like to call it is USB for musicians instead of using a typewriter keyboard or a calculator number pad to input data into a computer. We as musicians use the electronic wind controller. We use a mallet. We use a percussion and we use keyboard and we actually use string instruments as well. Would you describe a midi show to someone who has no idea coming in? What would you say to them to expect during the show? Anything. Yeah, be prepared for the unexpected. And pay attention, I think, because there are so many different sounds, you just never know what you're going to get. And if you're not paying attention, you miss things. I think it's pretty important in a midi, it's a concert to really lock in as an audience member and try to figure out, okay, who's making that sound. And we're going to try to make it obvious tonight who is making each particular sound. It's an active experience. It's not designed to be whatever music, complacent music. It's the type of music because it is original, so the listeners never heard it before. But it's also a challenge in a sense because even though the rhythms are very familiar to the listener, what they're hearing along with that is something completely new. So we ask the listener to come on our journey. It isn't like rock and roll or country or polkas to where you start with one style and you end there. There's a lot happening. And that also includes some improvised solos in the middle of all that, too. So that's the jazz element, I think, improvisation. Roads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. If you enjoy watching Backroads Online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org.


perfect. Got it. Well, Sam, about the digital age, it's a great phenomenon that about the one I'm sorry, the digital age. Okay, so we want to talk about it in a in the terms of narcissism. And I want to ask, do you think that social media was driven by narcissistic people? Or the soul? How do you look at it? In terms of narcissism in the in the social medias? Well, social media was developed by people who are much more schizoid than narcissists, loners, nerds, and all these kind of people. Yes. However, social media has very strong narcissistic elements. I would focus on two. Social media increasingly take you away from the world. They don't bring you into the world. But they take you away from reality. This is going to culminate with the metaverse. The metaverse is going to be an all immersive or inclusive environment where you could basically do anything and everything you could go to work in the metaverse, you can do shopping in the metaverse, you could pick up nice girls in the metaverse and have sex with them. And all of it will be virtual in the metaverse, you will be wearing a haptic suit. So you will experience tech time input. They are even thinking of adding smells to the mixture. So the metaverse will be is designed as a total substitute to reality. And it is the culmination of a trend of divorcing people from reality. This is one of the main determinants of narcissism. As we said in our previous conversation, narcissism is a failure to gauge reality properly and to accept the separateness and reality of other people. So in social media, people are commodified, they're digitized, they're objectified, they're not treated like real people. The second thing that social media, all social media without a single exception do. They want you to be alone. Social media are enemies of intimacy, friendship, interconnectivity, community, collaboration, cooperation, and any other form of human interaction. The reason is very simple. If you have a girlfriend, you're going to dedicate time to her, you're going to pay her attention. This is attention that you're taking away from Facebook. Attention economy. Yes, it's an attention economy. Facebook digitizes, monetizes, I'm sorry, your eyeballs. Now, if your eyeballs are on your girlfriend, they are not on Facebook. And that affects Facebook's bottom line. These are profit driven utilities, and I'm using the word utilities on purpose, because they should have been regulated as utilities, as monopolies, as cartels, but no one dares. No politician dares to confront Facebook, or Twitter, or any of these platforms, because they can be banned, they can be shadow banned and become invisible to the public, as they have tried to do to Donald Trump. So what's happening is, these platforms encourage you to be alone. Because intimacy, a relationship reduces their profits. If you have an intimate relationship, if you have any kind of relationship, their profits go down. Additionally, lonely people consume a much higher proportion of their net income. That's an economic fact. So consumption is an engine here. In general, when you put together the money motive, the profit motive of social media, with the way the social media had been constructed, including by psychologists, you see that social media have three goals in mind. And mind in this case is the profit and loss statement. The first goal, take you away from reality, and create for you such an alternative that would satisfy all your needs and reduce your incentive and motivation to go out into the world to compromise, to negotiate, to sacrifice, and to somehow cope with other people. Goal number two, to make sure that you remain single and alone, not only single, single and alone, because then they can maximize your attention. And goal number three, to make sure that you have only negative emotions, never positive emotions, only negative emotions, because negative emotions, as we know, create much higher engagement. Negative emotions are extremely highly positively correlated with stickiness. So if you are angry, if you're envious, you're likely to revisit the page much more than if you are happy and loving. Yes. So they want you angry and envious, and envy is structured into the mechanism of social media through likes and relative positioning. So they want you to be jealous of other people, envious of other people all the time, and they give you, they give you visible indicators of how you stand in relation to others. This is a mechanism known as relative positioning, how many likes do you have? How many views do you have? Et cetera, et cetera. YouTube, for example, removed recently, the dislike feature, you see only the likes. Yes, dislikes. Dislikes are bad for business. Likes are good for business. Because likes would cause you to compare yourself to others, your peers. And so you will strive to maximize likes. And also you can use it as a form of manipulation as for example, there was a YouTube rewind, if you know what it is, it's where the famous, the most famous like influencers from YouTube are meaning and all that. And they're doing a beautiful video about what they did, and giving messages there. So the dislike button was like in the millions. And afterwards, they said no more dislikes, because we're trying to keep it positive out there. No, it's not positive. That is the common that they're gaslighting people. Yes, likes, likes, create negative emotions. We have numerous studies about this is an absolute lie. Likes on Facebook, likes on YouTube, create negative emotions. They activate a mechanism known as relative positioning. And you compare yourself to others, peers, and then you feel bad. And that incentivizes you to escalate your behavior. So there's a lot of behavior escalation, trolling and worse. Any discussion that starts on the internet deteriorates within minutes to insults, aggression, violence, attacks, threats. Why? Because of the way the platforms are structured, the incentive structure of the platform. Yes, they're going with the process of radicalizing everything. That means social movements, as well as sexuality. And if there was the way to also go through there with ideology, bad ideology, they would do it as well. But it's not appealing to their interest. So they won't do it to the maximum. They started to do it, but they were reined in by politicians and regulators. But they absolutely started to do it. But they were just discovered on earth. There were whistleblowers who blew the whistle on everything and so the another thing is, of course, you need to escalate to be noticed. You need to escalate to garner attention. Yes. So behaviors tend to escalate because the candy, the reinforcement is in the form of attention. So what these platforms do, they harvest harvest attention from everyone, they harvest attention, and then they redistribute the attention to the users in a way that promotes escalatory radicalizing behavior. Yes. And this is not just an abstract French observation. This is exactly what they're doing. They take away your attention, and they give it to someone. How do they decide to whom to give it? There's an algorithm. They take away your attention and the algorithm dictates that your attention will be given to someone whose behavior is escalatory, whose behavior is radical, whose behavior is crazy, insane, rageful. So these people get much more attention than people who are positive and nice and happy yet. Yes, in the social media is like the heads of it are playing dumb, like they don't know the algorithm and all that, but they are the ones who are making it.  And that incentivize the culture of just over sexualization, I would say, and also undermining intimacy. I would like to think any radical behavior, lack of intimacy is a radical behavior because we are built for intimacy. Any radical behavior, including, for example, conspiracy theories, yes, information, fake news, any radical behavior, anti social behavior online. And so any radical behavior. Now, of course, the platforms are protected by the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which exempts them from any editorial or other constraints. On the one hand, and on the other hand, they allow users to be anonymous. And anonymity is a great motivator for anti social behavior. We have studies by Dana Reilly and others who demonstrate which demonstrated pretty conclusively that when you allow people to be anonymous, they misbehave badly. Yes, when you don't supervise them. For example, when you leave the room, and you leave them alone. And so whatever they're doing is anonymous. No one they feel like they have no consequences for their actions. Yes. And so the why do platforms not insist on identity verification? It's extremely easy.  It's two minutes, two seconds. Upload your passport. Upload your ID. Use your real name. Why they don't do this? Because they want negative emotions, negative reactions, extreme behaviors, radicalism. They want this. It is a bread and butter. It garners generates much more attention. What would you what would what would people rather watch? A car crash? Or two pigeons kissing? Our course, of course, by far. Yes, it's like, it's, it's the thing like with good news and bad news. There is not a site for good news. There's they're not popular. They're not popular. That's it.  For likes and views. Yes, they're not neutral. The perception is that social platforms are neutral. Because they're neutral. They shouldn't be regulated. They shouldn't be penalized. They shouldn't be held responsible or accountable. That's nonsense. That's not true. There are several whistleblowers from Google and Facebook, including psychologists who participated in the design of the platforms. These testimonies are available online. Go and listen to them. These platforms were designed with malice maliciously. They are malevolent. They are not benign. But the question is, then Sam, okay, we have Mr. Beast, who is the most popular YouTuber, right now with 100 some 100 something million. Well, he's not sharing some bad things. He's like curing people, helping them aiding them. Then what you're saying right now, maybe not hold against what he does. You can cure people and heal people in a variety of ways. For example, you can do it grandiosly. Okay. So that cater to grandiosity and narcissism and so on. And I regret to say that the vast majority of public intellectuals, so called healers and so on and so forth online are probably covert narcissists in my in my estimate. So there's a lot of narcissistic interaction going on undercover. You remember our previous conversation I told you about Mother Teresa and communal, communal narcissists and activists and so on and so forth and called Greta Thunberg. You know, I have my suspicions as to her state of mind and it's not benign what I'm thinking. So a lot of narcissism and psychopathy masquerades as good deeds. And of course, this is extreme radicalized behavior, because it's ostentatious. It's like giving charity in public with the cameras clicking. Yes. That's basically what he does. Yes. So, you know, I have my reservations. I think it's part of the radicalization and escalation of the game. Is that we'll talk about this capitalism thing that you can show a lot of money and all of that in the social age and like that can get you can get recognized far more because of your actions and all of that. Do you think it's a form of manipulation that they're doing to some extent, the use of big money, like you say grandiosingly, in the social age to show those selves as good people, but in themselves, they're not they're just doing like you said, a facade. Yeah, narcissists will do anything to obtain supply and to maintain a fantasy, but many of them don't even bother to pretend that they're good people. They just they just brag about their successes, the private jets, the limousines, the beautiful girls hanging on their arms, and so on and so forth. It's an envy economy. Social media is constructed on consumption of attention and distribution of envy. Envy is a great motivator. We even have studies by Twenge and Campbell and others that show the teenagers are inclined to commit suicide because of envy. Because they can't compete. It's a competition gun malignant. They can't compete. And so the rate of suicide among young people has increased dramatically since the moment the social media were introduced into their lives. The rates of depression, the rate of depression has done up three times the rate of anxiety disorders, five times, 500%. And the only difference, the only the only differential component, the only thing that changed was social media. The only thing that changed in these youngsters' lives was social media. So additionally, we are beginning to see anti social and our social behaviors, for example, the frequency of sex has deteriorated among young people. Yes, for men, it's like 28% or something along those lines between the ages of 18 and 30. And for women at the same ages, it's like 17%. But it's like going up all the time. And that's only the test we have from 2018. We don't know after COVID, how much this percent went up. That's interesting. But all in all, the frequency of sex has collapsed by 30% since the since the 80s. So we have a generation that is far less sexually active, but not only sexually active, socialize as far less, engages in adult behaviors far less. For example, 35% of people under age 35, it's easy to remember 35 under 35, still live with their parents. They still live with their parents. And that is a global phenomenon from Italy to the United States all over the world. And people today get a driving license two and a half years later than the previous generations. And so on so forth.  Social media, because it divorces you from reality, also divorces you from the pressures to grow up. Reality forces you to grow up. So there is a general retardation, a general lack of maturity in the population that is also attributed to a large extent to social media. And I'm very worried where social media is going. Very worried because the metaverse is absolutely a dystopian nightmare. Absolutely dystopian, in my view. And no one seems to be stopping it. No one regulators don't intervene. If it's coupled with AI, the result could be horrible. And at least in this world, we have a so called God that controls us and our behaviors and we have all of that the morals. But in this world, humans will control it. And that's a recipe for maybe disaster because we don't know what they will do with us. We know that power corrupts. We know all of that. So yes, it's, it's scary. And it's not, and it's not regulated. That's a problem because politicians don't really dare to go there. They can be blacklisted and vanish, simply vanish. Today people, today people consume news 56% through Facebook. Wow. Facebook is three and a half times bigger than all the major networks, including CNN combined.  Now, until now, there was a competition on eyeballs and attention between the tech giants. The metaverse means that the tech giants will try to control reality. So the new resource is not attention. The new resource is reality. They will try to construct realities, alternative realities, virtual realities.  So now the new resources to be mined is not Bitcoin and it's not eyeballs. It's reality. They're mining reality. And you're right that while Bitcoin is a distributed ledger and so no one is in control and even social media are still sufficiently distributed. So big groups of users can alter the behavior of social media. The metaverse will be centrally controlled possibly by one person and that's really terrifying. Yes, because he will see himself as this godlike person. He will be God because he will be the creator of worlds. That's how the VEDA opens. He will be Vishnu, the creator of worlds. Yo, that thought is so interesting. And okay, let's go a bit to the start of this conversation where you talked about kids and the things they use in social media like the TikToks and Instagrams and all of that. And because of it, they have more mental illnesses and all of that. How can you as a parent control that your child will not be on social medias or tell them or show them that it's not healthy? How to control them? You think? You can limit usage, let's say, to two hours a day. But kids will find their way around it. I think the genie is out of the bottom. You're thinking pessimistically entirely. There is no way back. Totally. Look at the last 20 years. Have I been wrong? I mean, would I have been wrong had I been pessimistic? No. I mean, the last 20 years are from bad to worse and from worse to worse. I don't see any improvement in any field or area or whatever. I think I'm realistic. I'm not pessimistic. I think technology shapes consciousness the same way reality shaped consciousness in the past. And in this sense, technology is a new religion because we had a period in human history where what could easily be described as a fantasy. There is God and there is heaven and there is this and there is that. What could really be a fantasy controlled our consciousness, determined it and the content of our consciousness. And then we got rid of the fantasy. We have the age of enlightenment where we engage with reality without the interface of a fantasy. And then after 200, 300 years, we are very disappointed. We are not happy.   Fantasy was much better. And you have figures like Jordan Peterson who are actually saying this. They're saying the past was much better because we had a fantasy. The fantasy of God, the fantasy of values, of family, you know. So they're strong public advocates of getting rid of the reality principle to use Freud's term and adopting the fantasy principle. The problem is this. The fantasies of the past were intimately coupled with pro-social values and beliefs. The fantasies of the future starting with the metaverse and don't believe the metaverse will be the last step. Holographic techniques, you know, metaverse in artificial intelligence, maybe chips in your brain. I don't know. Neurlink, like mask ones. Yes. I don't know where it's going to end. So the fantasies of the future are all constructed around profits, are all constructed around power, encourage escalation and negativity, encourage loneliness and lack of intimacy, have no values and no identity. The fantasies of the future are not like the fantasies of the past. So while we can say our experimented reality between the 18th and the 21st century failed, it led us to bed places. It led us to the Holocaust. It led us to nuclear bombs.  We should get rid of it. We should go back to a fantasy. We are going, no, we're not going back to a fantasy. We're going forward to very, very dangerous and threatening fantasies. So we have basically two things here. We're going from evolutionary to revolutionary, but this revolutionary is not healthy for us as human beings. And you said about reaction, I would say reactionary. We're going back to a fantasy principle. Listen, the first metaverse was the city. A city is an artificial creation, totally artificial. It's virtual reality. A city is virtual reality. So we had already experimented with the fantasy of this kind. Religion is a fantasy defense. So we, most of mankind's existence was in fantasy. So we are going back to the principle of fantasy that's reactionary. But because of technology, the content of our fantasies is such that they cannot be axiological. They cannot contain values. The only value is profit. So they cannot contain values. So you cannot couple the fantasy with prescriptive norms of behavior or proscriptive norms of behavior. In other words, the fantasy will not be able to tell you, don't do this or do this and reward you or incentivize you to behave properly or socially. These fantasies are open-ended. They are neutral. They are totally phenomenological. They are objective. They are not normative fantasies. And this is the danger because if you find yourself embedded in a fantasy that has no values and no norms and no conventions and no mores and no prescriptions and no proscriptions, nothing to guide you, then you're lost. And when people are lost, they do horrible things to each other. Yes. And that's where Nietzsche comes into play. And we talk about the madman where he comes and says, God is dead. We have killed him. And more than that, he says his shadow will be there and staying for thousands of years. And people forget that fact that if we will try to do it, God will stay in a certain way within us. So trying to forget about that fact is ludicrous in some extent. God. Well, I'm not religious, of course. And I believe that God is a fantasy. And me as well. To some extent. But the God principle shouldn't stay. The God principle, yes. Everything will be corrupted. I think this is something that maybe I've not made clear. Everything inside you will be corrupted.  It means it consumes you. You get immersed in it.  You will leverage it to do bad things. And to justify yourself with your internal God. The fantasy corrupts. That's why all historical fantasies like religion or like nation state, nationhood. Nationhood is also fantasy. It's a totally counterfactual invention.  There's no such thing as a nation as a race. It's all nonsense. But it's a fantasy. So in the 90th century we had the fantasy of nation states. But look what happened with Nazism. Yes. When you have a fantasy that leverages values and principles in the wrong way, you end up with horrors and atrocities. A lot of people killed. Yes. So this is my fear. The new fantasies, the new cluster of fantasy, the new generation of fantasies, they are norm free. They have no values. They're open to anything. You know, everything is possible. No problem. Everything is equal to everything. Everyone is equal to everyone. There's no hierarchy in any sense, normative or intellectual or whatever. And so all goes. Everything goes. Everything goes. Wait a minute. If everything goes, I'm going to use all my assets.  And I'm going to abuse it in the fantasy. The same way the nation state was abused by Hitler. The same way religion was abused by the crusaders and so on so forth. Everything can be corrupted and will be corrupted given the wrong fantasy. Fantasy is an organizing principle of the human mind and of human lives. We need to be very careful what we are doing with fantasies. Very careful. Had you spoken to Germans in the 1930s, they would have told you that there are moral people, moral beings, ethical. They're doing the right thing. They're saving humanity from the contagion known as the Jews because they were embedded in Hitler's fantasy. Yes. His story. Fantasy is not something we should play. It's as dangerous as artificial intelligence. It's not something we should play with recklessly, you know. And we're doing this. But the question is, okay, we're going to the artificial intelligence thingy.  How do you look about it? Like relationships right now will be maybe with artificial intelligence. What do you think? But artificial intelligence is an entity. It is silicon-based today, maybe titanium-based in the future or whatever, but it's still an entity. It's an entity with, I think, pretty shortly in 10 years' time, it will be an entity with its mind, sentient and intelligent and self-aware and so on. In due time, in 50 years and 100 years, there will be no meaningful distinction between you and Moshe's 7.0, who will be an artificial intelligence entity. And so I think our fear of artificial intelligence is, in this sense, misplaced because they will come to resemble us. In due time, they will become very human-like, android, and then the relationship will be like the relationship between Neanderthals and the Chromaneon. We're inventing a new humanoid species. Ultimately, we're inventing a new humanoid species based on different elements like silicon. And we are raising these species by teaching these species to think and to be self-aware and to write poetry and to answer questions wrongly, by the way, via chat GPT and so on. But it will take time and in 100 years, there will be silicon-based people and carbon-based people and the distinction would be laughable.  So that doesn't bother me at the least.  It's a fantasy after all. The defense would be, it's not real. You know, that would be the defense. And then mass atrocities will be committed within the metaverse and they will have real life consequences because millions of teenagers will commit suicide, for example. And psychopaths will leverage this fantasy to steal money from pensioners. And I can think of a million other, already we have instances of rape in the VR chat rooms. We already have instances of sexual assault and rape. It's nothing yet. I mean, it's just an avatar. Now imagine when your whole body will be there through integrated haptic suits and I mean, then it will be real rape, it will be real rape, but happening in a fantasy. So we need to introduce ethical guidelines now. Now we need it even to legislate. We need to say no one will have a license for a multiverse unless they conform to a code of ethics, which is formulated and so on. But we are not even beginning to go there. Yes, how can you do it?  They are bigger than countries in terms of their wealth. And also in terms of their influence. And the question comes, okay, we know politicians are doing the same things over and over again to maybe appeal to their interests, maybe to stay in the throne. We don't know. Can we trust them to do that? I don't know. I don't think so. We can't trust politicians to do that because they're compromised by social media. Politicians need, politicians need exposure. They need to be in the news. Social media control exposure and the news. So of course, politicians are in the pocket of social media.  Yes. The only way to rein in the next generation of social media, which is immersive, solipsistic, anti-real, unreal, anti-reality, and value free. The only way is a grassroots movement akin similar to the environmental movement. It's the only way when people realize the dangers in the next generation of social media coupled with artificial intelligence. Maybe there will be a grassroots ground well, groundswell of resistance or and then money talks, consumers talk, and they can dictate a code of ethics. For example, by walking off or walking away from certain platforms. And these platforms will be the havens of psychopaths and narcissists. Normal, healthy people will avoid these platforms because they don't have a code of ethics. Okay. I understand. But you, okay, there is the great reset as well that says like, you will own nothing and you will live happy like you never lived before. And we have also Yvonne Noir Harari who says that those people were not the smartest, cannot contribute to society. For example, we'll be on drugs and we'll be on computers. And I'm asking, okay, we want, we need the change because if we'll go to where we said we're going to go, it will be catastrophic. And I'm asking you some like, okay, if we will go to Marx and we will be revolutionary and we'll take our ideologies and not be only philosophers, but also execute what we say. Is that a solution by your by your eyes? No, it cannot be through any central authority, intellectual or political. This must be a grassroots movement. Because the only currency, the only language, these platforms understand are the language of money. Yes. So if you boycott or cancel a platform, that, that is going to hurt. And it's going to hurt where it hurts in the wallet. And they're going to modify their behavior. So if you have a metaverse without a code of ethics or without a set of values, and if you have a metaverse with a code of ethics and a set of values, you need to educate people that the first metaverse without values is very dangerous because it will be the hunting ground for psychopaths analysis. And the second one is safe. And then people will gravitate to the safe option. And a small minority of wackos and criminals and I don't know what, they will go to the first, to the, to the value less option. Okay. Let them have a psychopath paradise or analysis is haven. No problem. But at least they will be isolated, identifiable. And by the way, subject to law enforcement. Make it much easier for law enforcement. But it needs to be grassroots. There is no single intellectual or political authority that can impose its will on social media. None. Or high tech, more generally, not only social media. Consider, for example, the introduction of artificial intelligence into search engines. Yes. What does it do? It removes pluralism. It removes diversity. It homogenizes and monopolizes the answer. What is the answer? It's a real reality. It's about reality. I keep telling you, they're mining reality. Yeah. So now if you ask, if you go to Bing chat and you ask, who is Sam Vaknin? You don't get a hundred links, some of which are very bad, by the way. You don't get a hundred links. You get a single answer. This single answer is your only reality. Yeah. This is a way to monopolize reality because the vast majority of people are lazy. They will not go beyond the single answer. And I can tell you, as an experienced user, I found it very difficult to read, to find out how to go from a single answer to multiple answers. They don't make it easy. They want you to consume the single answer. I went to Bing chat and I asked a series of questions about myself, of course. Who else? 80% of the answers were wrong. 80. I asked, what year did I marry my wife? 1997. Wrong. Wrong, for example. 80% of the answers were wrong. But that's others' perceptions and reality for them. But for them, it would be the only truth they would say. Actually, one of them did say, someone sent me a screenshot. You see, this chat engine says you're not a professor. Luckily, luckily, Bing chat gets it right. So if you ask me, it says yes. Luckily for me. But there's another obscure, I forgot the name, AI engine that says I'm not a professor. And this person didn't bother to go to Bing or to Google, but it was the Bible. That's it. That's the answer. It's the only reality. There is a competition to monopolize reality between the high tech companies, the high tech giants. Reality is the new Terra incognita. And they're going to colonize reality. It's a colonial movement. Reality is the new real estate. And they are now colonizing it, mining it, exploiting the local natives. I mean, exactly like colonialism in the 19th century. And to do that, they create, they use artificial intelligence and a new generation of fantasies, which are going to be so permissive and so open that they will never create objections anywhere.  Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Because first of all, it brings pluralism, like you said. But secondly, it may bring misinformation. So you like you said in one of your interviews, it's like a tsunami of information. So maybe that pluralism also is not that good of a solution. Of course. But providing a single answer is definitely the worst conceivable solution. You need to rank websites according to credibility, institutional support, reliability, etc. So you can't have a 19 year old's website equal, for example, to the Britannica. Yes, you need to you need to rank. Yes, this is being done or less. But now with the introduction of AI, you're excluded from all this. And all you get is a single answer. It's like a religion. It's a single answer. It's a creed. Yeah, exactly. Your your your heritage, if you ask for more, I couldn't find how to find more. He was all over being trying to how can I get additional answers? Finally, I succeeded. But it took me like five minutes. So there's a single answer there. And I asked 10 questions. Eight. Eight of the answers were wrong. Factually wrong. Forget about opinions, values, judgments, factually wrong. The facts were wrong. And by the way, the facts are freely available, for example, on Wikipedia. Yeah, so it's easy access. But I'm asking, okay, then let's go to the internet and let's people edit edit all those stuff. There will be also again agenda. It's a search engine and power will come. And like it came to the science, you know, money will come. And then you know, not the truth will prevail. But the interests of people. And that's where the interest in the internet is is there at this stage. It's a problem. I think any utility that is not subject to regulation is bound to get corrupted and dangerous. I am I was amongst the earliest proponents of regulating the internet. I know it's not a popular opinion. But we are seeing the consequences now with it's with a tsunami of fake news and misinformation. Yes, you can't get reliable answers on the internet anymore. I know, because I've been doing it for 25 years, you can't really get reliable answers anymore, you need to work really hard to compare multiple sources and so on. And to form your own opinion finally, even then, it's just an opinion. You know, you can't rely on the internet. So yes, it's co-opted and so but had there been some regulatory oversight, and in monetary incentives, for example, fines and penalties. Trust me, high tech companies would have found within minutes ways to provide you with credible information that is verified and so minutes. But but Sam also a problem we cannot trust anybody in his age, basically, whatever it's the government, whatever it's those high tech companies, we don't trust anybody. Like, so it's also like in the eyes of the people, not a proper solution to this big old problem. I would like to it's a problem of malignant egalitarianism. People think that everyone is equal to everyone. It's not true. There's a hierarchy. I agree with Jordan Peterson. There's a hierarchy. People with academic degrees know more than people without academic degrees. The Britannica is much better source than Wikipedia. City's Endume is much better source than Wikipedia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This hierarchy should be a decor of such results. And that similarly, there's a hierarchy of values. For example, the values of Nazism are lower on the hierarchy than the values of the Old Testament or the New Testament. I think vast majority of population would agree, except a few neo-Nazis. So we need to create hierarchies and integrate them. They're called axiological hierarchies. We need to create axiological and by the way taxonomic hierarchies and integrate them in technology. And we are not doing this today. We are going exactly the opposite way. And the opposite way is everyone is equal to everyone. You're not supposed to offend anyone. Opinion is as good as truth and there is no truth. And there are no facts. And you contrast experts and you contrast professionals. They are corrupted by money, they're lying, they're and so on. And so COVID was the best example for it. So it's a disaster waiting to happen because we are like a flock without a shepherd. We need shepherds. We need what used to be called gatekeepers. You couldn't publish anything without an editor in the past. I know because I published books and I needed to go through editors. You couldn't. But today you can. So there is a problem of discoverability. You go on Amazon on a typical year, anywhere between one million and three million so-called books are published. How will you find my book? My book is one of the best on the topic of narcissism. But how on earth are you going to find it when every year there's 5000 books on narcissism published? And how will you know that it's one of the best? Maybe I'm lying. There's a problem of discoverability. We are drowning in trash, intellectual trash and so on. I witnessed a conversation on a forum. One guy said the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066. And another guy said, no, I think you're wrong. It was 1086. So the first guy posted a snippet from Britannica, from the Britannica. Yeah. Or was it Wikipedia? And I think it was Britannica. And then the second guy said, well, that's a Britannica's opinion. My opinion is that it happened in 1086. There is no end to it.  So it's a problem. To have a conversation right now between those two ideologies as well, he will say the left and the right. Nobody, at least the left, I think, maybe I'm wrong. Disagrees more to have a conversation with the right. So we can even go to proper solutions on those problems because one side thinks he's the smartest and knows all. And the other side says his reality is the only right reality. And like that, it dismisses the other side. So where can we find the solution? He actually didn't say that his reality is the only. No, I'm saying my reality is as legitimate as your reality and as legitimate as Britannica. We're all equal. I call it Malignant egalitarianism. We're all equal. It's not that I'm more equal, but we're all equal. My opinion, Britannica's opinion, your opinion is opinion. So with that, how can we go and just just understand and go as a community together and take the root of the problem and just have a solution for it if we cannot even have a proper community with us. And if the proper community we have it, we cannot merge it into physical identities and have with them something that will do a better change for humanity. Problem is identity politics. Campbell, who is a sociologist, said that we transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood. And identity politics has a lot to do with victimhood. Even that person who was arguing with the Britannica, he felt like a victim of the intellectual establishment. He was a rebel. It was an act of rebellion. He was just arguing with Britannica. He was arguing with the whole western tradition of academics, professors, experts. He was showing the middle finger to academic institutions and to professors and to experts and scholars. He was telling them, I'm as good as you. There is a divorce between elites and the people. There's hatred between the elites and the people. All elites, medical elites, intellectual elites, I mean, you name it. And there are mediators known as public intellectuals. They're trying to bridge the gap, but ultimately they also become demagogues and they support the people against the elites. They start off as a breach and they end up on the side of the people against the elites because it pays if you're on the side of the people who make a hell of a lot more money. It's very difficult. I made a video online saying that people who refuse to receive COVID vaccines are probably psychopathic and narcissistic. You should have seen what happened to me. I lost half my subscribers and half my income. I was severely penalized for saying this. Wow. Yet this is the obligation of an intellectual, a true intellectual. That's my obligation to say the truth as I see it and back it up with facts as I can find. It's my obligation. Intellectuals betray their obligation because they also succumb to money. Money corrupted everything. You keep pushing me for solutions. I don't know. I am not convinced there are solutions. You see, sometimes the only solution is total devastation. Post-apocalypse. Schumpeter was an economist called it creative destruction. And on earth. We need to go through a phase of destruction in order to rebuild because the structure we have constructed over the last three, four hundred years is not going to stand. There's no point in renovating it and painting it and I don't know calling the plumbers and we just need to destroy the bloody thing and start from scratch. And I think we are well on the way. I think we are well on the way. Okay, let's go again to the another five minutes because I have clients and so on. No problem. No problem. So one quick question about relationships in the digital age. In terms of that, because we have a tendency to see a lot of the people just picturing themselves and let just go to the women. They're leaving the sexual photos, for example, on Instagram, but they're going to relationships. So it's some sort of. I cannot explain it, but a different dynamic of relationship because you're not living in the past. You're you're letting people just see it. Meanwhile, you're in a new like era in a new life. So do you see it as a problem? Relationships in the age of social media. In postmodern society. Relationships are performative. It's a performance. It's a performance to the benefit of other people.  It's all a performance. That's the first element, which is very destructive to a relationship because you dedicate all your energy and emotions and everything to the performance, not to the relationship. And you expect your partner to collaborate to the performance. And if he doesn't, you're very angry. And the second thing we regard each other as objects and commodities. We consume each other. So it's a consumption thing. You consume your partner. The financial benefits your partner can give you. His status in society, how the way he looks, you know, you advertise his looks or or his brain or whatever. So you, we regard other people as objects to be consumed. And it's a very self selfish and self interested view. And then when they agree to team up with us, we construct a theater play or a movie, which is very narcissistic.  That's why people, when they break up, are very furious and angry and hateful and resentful and try to take revenge and so on. Because it's not reality they have lost. It's the dream. It's a dream scape. Modern relationships are dream scapes. And people no longer live in reality because reality is tough. Reality is hard. Reality requires hard work and compromises.   But fantasy, a dream, who wants to wake up from a dream?  So that's why people break up in a very bad way today, acrimoniously. I think we have exhausted the subject ourselves and our reviewers. So thank you. Well, first of all, thank you, Sam. You're an incredible guest and also you have an incredible channel. So please follow him on YouTube, Sam Vaknin. You will have also the link in the description below. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Bye. Great. Thank you very much, Sam. I appreciate that.


Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome to the windy city, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stuart Miniman-Stu. This is our second year of covering VeeamON. Although we have covered Veeam as a company since the early days of its ascendancy into the virtualization space, we really focus on it as a VMware specialist, virtualization only, now expanding dramatically into the enterprise. This is a company that has grown from, you know, very small to quite large. It's going to be probably close to a billion dollars in bookings this year, growing at 30 plus percent each year. A company that is moving beyond just the small business into the core of the enterprise with new executives, new messaging, renewed partnerships that seem to be really gaining traction. Veeam is a backup and data protection specialist that's now trying to rebrand itself as an always-on for the digital world, hyper-availability, intelligent data management, multi-cloud environment, throwing a few more buzzwords, Stu, and they're punching above their weight, as they always have, and it's a playbook that Veeam has used very, very successfully. Combine that with the branding, green everywhere. They've taken over Chicago. Veeam is famous for its parties, parties at VMworld and other big events like HPE Discover. And this is, I don't know, fifth, sixth Veeam on that they've had, and we've got how many people here, Stu? 2200. 2200, so what's your take? You saw the keynotes this morning. You were in the private analyst sessions today. Give us your analysis of Veeam.  They started out for the partner day. Veeam's all about their partners. Last year, you and I documented what they talked about is they were transitioning from the 10 years of virtualization to the next big wave, which is cloud. Doesn't mean that virtualization goes away. There's lots that they're doing in the multi-hypervisor world, but multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud, it's any data, any app, any cloud is the message. And Peter McKay started out, Dave, big hero numbers for the company. As you said, they've had over double digit growth. For now, it's 39 quarters. Hugely impressive, 827 million in 2017 bugging. The goal, absolutely, is to be over $1 billion this year. For me, the number that jumped out, really, is they have 300,000 customers. You and I were talking to Ratmir a little bit and said, okay, VMware has 500,000. He's like, well, 550,000 customers, and Veeam's in about 270,000 of those. So about half of all VMware customers are in there, that Veeam is in there, but they have lots of headroom for growth in those VMware environments, as you've heard Veeam say over and over, the growth opportunity for them is the enterprise. So while they're in a lot of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 accounts, they haven't penetrated them nearly as deeply as, say, a VMware has, but when you look at 300,000 customers, Dave, they're adding 133 customers a day. That's about 10,000 a quarter. 133 a day, 10,000 a quarter. Say, comparing contrast against another Veeam partner, Nutanix is adding about 1,000 customers a quarter, which is great for Nutanix for their market, but as a software company in the cloud world, Veeam can stack themselves up against, against some of the largest software companies in the world, and they put out the plan in place is how they're going to get not only over a billion, but get to that $5 billion mark, which is some really rarefied area. So let's stay on that for a second. Two themes I want to cover. First, the customers, 300,000 customers, 90% are virtualized and using VMware. That was the roots of this company. But there's 500,000, 550,000, I think now, VMware customers, so there's some opportunity there. We're going to talk to Ratmir Tamashev, the founder, he was sharing with us before, that their mantra earlier on was no physical, just virtual, just virtual. Well, last year they announced physical, they're expanding, that's a TAM expansion move. Their TAM is much, much bigger than, just a couple of billion dollars in pure backup. It's in the $20, $30 billion range now. So that leads me to the second point, which is Veeam is an enterprise software, Veeam is a pure software company, first of all. So they are beginning to reach that rarefied air of a billion dollar plus companies. Obviously Oracle, SAP, Salesforce are there, but others have recently cracked a billion. ServiceNow, Workday, companies like that. Red Hat, obviously, is another one that's blown through that billion dollar figure, doing very, very well. Some would argue that Nutanix is a software company, could even argue sort of stretching it now, Pure is a software company, a lot of software innovation, but Veeam, there's no argument, they are a pure software company. The number of billion dollar software companies is few and far between, Veeam is about to crack that magic number, which is not trivial. Yeah, and Dave, we talk about going beyond virtualization to cloud. Last year, one of the big discussion points is they bought N2WS, which is really how they get back up into AWS, and they've got large growth, 153 growth a year over a year. Other one, Microsoft, big partner of theirs, both for virtualization, something that was kind of sent a ripple through the whole virtualization industry when Veeam got off of only VMware and added Hyper-V support, while Azure, they've got over 2,500 downloads of their Azure solution, so showing growth there, also supporting IBM Cloud, working with a lot of service providers, so the breadth of what they're offering and expanding beyond just the virtualization admin and some simple tools where Veeam had really cut their teeth, because Dave, that core business, there's a lot of competitors there now, and Veeam's trying to make sure that they fight off the competition and stay ahead in this multi-cloud world. So much to talk about, I want to talk about the competition, but before we get there, one of the critical factors for a company like Veeam, trying to attract enterprise customers, Veeam is a company who's known for their SMB heritage, and so partnerships, crucial, just some of the partnerships that they've signed and emphasized over the last year and a half, two years. HPE, my sources tell me, we heard Bill Philbin up on stage this morning, you got a keynote, my sources tell me that it's many, many tens of millions of dollars, so this is on its way to $100 million partnership. IBM, you mentioned IBM Cloud, Microsoft, the Azure and stuff, Pure Storage, Nutanix, VMware obviously has always been a partner. NetApp, Cisco, we heard up on stage today, so expanding the partner ecosystem, still explain why that's so important. Yeah, so first of all Dave, so many places, how does Veeam go to market? One of the more interesting things if you talk about the sales motion is HP and Cisco now have Veeam in their price books. So Veeam, great channel, customers that love them, over 300,000, but when you take the Cisco Salesforce and the HPE Salesforce and say, you guys can make money on this, that really hypercharges what they're doing. It was always nice that they partnered with VMware, but how do you get deeper into those environments? I know you want to touch on the competition, we'll make sure we cover, there's some critical hires that they've also had in recent times, but what's your take on the competition? Before we get to competition, I do want to talk about the talent, but I just want to mention HPE, the reason why HPE to me is so interesting is because when they sold their software business to Micro Focus, they jettisoned the old HP data protect, or HP protect software business, that opened up a huge opportunity in vacuum for Veeam to slide in. They were very aggressive with regard to partnering with HPE, smart move by Veeam, and I think smart move by HPE. Even though it's more of a reseller slash partnership agreement. Talent, this company has been able to attract talent. It started with Peter McKay, who was brought in to top level the messaging and the executive team. He's brought in a number of folks in sales and marketing, with new CMO is on as well. They've attracted a few, one in particular, analysts. So one of the kerfuffles before this show was Gartner announced that two of its analysts were leaving to go to Rubrik. Well, over the weekend, when this announcement came out, Veeam executives saw that, one of them was Dave Russell, who we've had in the queue before, a very sharp guy, very well known, respected. Veeam jumped on him on that weekend and said, no, you know us better than you know Rubrik. You got to come work for us. And so they stole Dave Russell away. We saw Dave Russell on stage today. He left Rubrik at the altar, which I'd rather see that than him going to work for Rubrik for, you know, four or five months. But what do you make of that? Yeah, so Dave, we've seen a lot of jumps recently from the analyst side. It's interesting. We actually, Jason Buffington, who we'd have on theCUBE many times, is also here at Veeam. So hot space, I know last year at Veeam World, we said kind of this whole backup secondary storage market is one of the hottest areas. There's a lot of money, there's a lot of growth. And what's the analyst's job is to really understand some of these trends here. So some of them, it's something that they're passionate on. They called Dave Russell the godfather of backup. So he said he wanted to be a builder. He wanted to get in. Heck, even a good friend of mine just announced he's joining Veeam, Mark Toomey, who was from the EMC side, worked on the backup stuff. Real strong technologist was one of the early bloggers. Really knows his stuff and, you know, based in Ireland. So Veeam's doing a real good job of attracting talent. Peter, okay, he's learning from his Patriots, how to bring in good talent. And we'll have him on and talk to you about that. As a lead into the competitive discussion, I want to give some analysis that we got from Peter Burris and David Floyer from the Wikibon team. They gave me a few points leading up to this conference that I want to share with our audience. Number one is data protection and orchestration are moving up the list on the level of CXO concerns. So we're seeing that very clearly in our research. The second point, this company talks a lot about the future and automation is being part of that. There's a dichotomy between the business and IT in terms of the expectations to the degrees of automation that exist. The business assumes there's a lot more automation there and there actually is. So you see executives up on stage talking about this automated world. The expectations in the business are that everything's going to be automated. It's not that simple yet today. That causes some friction potentially in the customer base. It means there's lots of room for churn. That's good news for a company like Veeam who's both an incumbent but a disruptor moving up market. The global 2000 according to David Floyer is leaving billions of dollars on the table in terms of lost revenue because they have inadequate data protection. If you look over three or four year period companies are losing money because of inadequate bolted on data protection strategies. The last point is all these vendors are vying for position. It's unclear who's going to win this game. You got no dominant player. You got the backup and recovery vendors. You got the storage companies like Dell and EMC. You got security companies that are in there. You got startups like Rubrik and Cohesity. You got Veeam who's an established. They're like a hybrid, both established and startups. So you've got this competitive dynamic which is really, really interesting. I want to flip it over to you. Last year at VMworld backup and recovery data protection was one of the hottest areas of topics of conversation and on the floor one of the most trafficked by customers. What's your take on that? Yeah, well Dave, you know, core to our research we've been talking about for, I can't even tell you how long. Data is at the center of it all. How do I not, it's not storing data. It's getting value from my data. It's unlocking data. It's not about big data. It's not about some cool new tooling that we have there. And what we've really found is if I've got, you know, good replicas. If I've got, you know, strong backup I can actually leverage my data more, get more value out of it. That's critical to what we're talking about here, Dave, which is why, you know, Veeam and others like them can get this. It's simplicity is something we hear over and over. The early days of VMware, that was why customers loved VMware and Veeam followed that trend a lot. It's really tough to be simple. That was that whole hyperconverged wave was supposed to be simple. Cloud is not simple today. It's multi-cloud. There's a lot of challenges there. So Veeam, their customers love them. The proof is in the numbers that they're putting in. I think that's great analysis. Let's close on that. The challenge, I think for Veeam, like some of the incumbents that you saw, Veritas, you know, IBM, when VMware's ascendancy occurred, Veeam stepped in and really disrupted and won that battle. Now, the others hung on. They hung on to their install base, but they're hanging on for dear life. You're seeing IBM now retooling its portfolio, Dell EMC retooling its backup portfolio, Veritas retooling its backup portfolio. So it's jump ball in that respect. Veeam's got to demonstrate that it can move from that virtualization specialist, small business specialist up into the enterprise, resonate with the CXOs and compete for its fair share. So we'll be watching that. We'll be covering that all week. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago. Veeam on 2018.