All right. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Congratulations for toughing it out towards the end of day three to discuss this good topic that we're very passionate about. This talk came out of the Q&A that from our talk that we gave in Amsterdam and lots of people joined us in the hallway to ask about a particular question that my friend Christian had asked, and we decided, you know, there's a whole talk there. And so the three of us stood in that hallway and made this talk. If you want to come closer, feel free. I know it's kind of a weird viewing from back there, but it's also you want to see the screens. So your choice, but feel free to come forward if you like. We're going to let Jordana introduce herself first. If this works. Hey, folks. I'm Jordana Fan. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a technical community manager looking for my next role. I'm the current chair of the community working group of the Drupal Open Source Project, who are tasked with fostering safe, inclusive, and healthy community, and to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct. I'm passionate about fostering community health, sharing knowledge, and empowering others, which is why I'm leading open source community health sessions for a few folks from different open source communities come together to share knowledge, collaborate, and support each other. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it there in person, but I am thankful to be able to participate in this amazing community digitally. I'm a lecturer from the University in Cologne. I'm also a freelance IT consultant. I use the pronouns he, him, and if I'm not doing, presenting many folks who's a rancher, I'm not teaching a university, then I'm a climate activist, and I run a couple of social groups amongst, one which is the Rancher User Group in Cologne, and I also support the AWS User Group. And my name is Lisa Marie Namphee. Most people call me Lisa. I'm a CNCF ambassador. I am developer relations community architect. I have been an ambassador for over three years now, but before that, architecting large user groups in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10 years, running open source communities there, started with the first OpenStack community, ran the first ever Istio Meetup, the first ever Azul Codd containers meetup. Last week, we ran the first ever NUMAflow project meetup. So I love to showcase the new, new technology, open source in particular. And for the three years previous to that, until very recently, I was the head of developer relations at Cockroach Labs, which was supporting the database Cockroach DB. So, we started off looking at conflicts that came out of our last, our last session together. Oh, you, it's not on? Better? Thank you. User error. Yeah. Okay. Well, after our last session of the last panel that we had together, we start looking at conflicts and we came up with what we wanted to do in today's panel, basically run through a, what is a conflict, then come up with some tools and end up with a communication method, methodology that we wanted to introduce to you. So what, what are conflicts? I mean, there is a sociological definition of what a conflict is, but mainly it is about miscommunication. It's about disagreements between, in the group. And mainly if we look at open source community groups, it is about inappropriate behavior. And that could be especially when we burst out in, in hybrid times, that could be offensive pictures. I've seen that a number of times happening. It could be unwanted physical contact. It could be misogyny, which is fairly prevalent in our, our kind of field of work. There is mansplaining, which is also something that you might or might not want. And anything else that is tied to usually a white male behavior. To prevent this, the first thing will be to actually agree on a code of conduct. And that is something that needs a kind of a group effort, a group brainstorming to agree on what is acceptable behavior in your community, whether you do support diversity, equity, inclusion. And then from that point onwards, you can create a code of conduct. There are very good, and Jolana will show the resources towards the end of the talk. There are some very good examples. I personally like the Berlin code of conduct, but hey, that's me coming from Germany. And what does a code of conduct do? First of all, once you've defined and you agreed, okay, this is how we want our group to be. Then you define the expected behavior and saying, dang, this is what we want our members to behave. Next step is you define what's unacceptable. And then you spell out the consequences of what happens if you do not adhere to it. Does that mean you will be exposed? Do you have to leave the conference or whatever this? So, and then final step is how do you address grievances, which is usually, which is actually more important in a, like in America where you litigate all the time. So, it's true. It's very true. So, but the point is, agree on what's good in the community. Then write it down and write down what's unacceptable and write down what happens if you go against it. One more? Chris just spoke about conflict and preventing it by implementing a code of conduct from your community. This is a great start in fostering inclusion and safe spaces. Participation in your community or event is a privilege, not a right. We must abide by the rules and conduct ourselves to the values and principles of the community. Text should be open to anyone and everyone. We are all different and this diversity brings new perspectives, which is important. But think of the paradox of tolerance, which discusses the need to be intolerant of intolerant. So, every person is welcome, but every behavior is not. Which is, which is why it's so important to have a code of conduct that makes it clear. So, when working on or reworking the code of conduct, remember to not reinvent the wheel and to try and learn from the experiences of others. It's important to know that we can and we should iterate on it and remember to get key community stakeholders involved. There are code of conduct templates available and we can look into communities we appreciate and see how they are doing things. But please remember, and I cannot stress this enough, the code of conduct is only as good as the enforcement of it. We need practice and planning to be effective and help maintain safe spaces, which is why I recommend looking into resources on enforcement and response. Chris will now talk about what to be aware of in creating and maintaining safe spaces. And I'm sorry, I think I messed something up. We were supposed to have closed captions on that, but we'll sort that out for the next video. Sorry, Joanna. She's online watching. We'll get there. Good. So, now that we have defined the group, we have defined our code of conduct. We've defined the consequences. Now, what do we do? And in most social groups and political spaces, that has become a practice called awareness, which is obviously based on the English word of awareness, but also means a practice in a group of people who take care of taking care of the group. Basically, it is care work and that gives us a tool and an ongoing process to actually deal with the inner workings of the group. Awareness by itself in English word means you want to be in the situation. You want to be attentive to the situation and you want to be aware and respectful of the boundaries of the others. I think that's the key point in awareness is to know and respect the boundaries of your fellow group members. And everybody is different. Some things that might be offensive to one person are completely okay to the others, but it's always the person who defines the boundaries. And that kind of turns the thing on its head, basically meaning I, as a person, I define my, I set my boundaries and I expect the other to adhere to the boundaries. I might need to explain them like we did with the buttons on the, which I don't wear right now. So the handshake stays six feet away button. So the key thing, if you deal with the key concept of awareness is everybody boundaries are different and it's the person who defines when the boundaries getting violated. So how do you do that? I mean, it sounds really nice and yes, we can all agree on it, but how do you practice in a group setting? First is you write an awareness concept, which sounds, again, we wrote a code of conduct. Now we need to write something again. So we write an awareness concept. Sometimes, and I've seen this in large festivals, you might want to include a safe word saying it's like, okay, if I, if I say to a person in the room, Panama, then that person will know, oh, there is a violation. Let me take the person out of the situation and clear it. Panama is a, is a safe word that a concert, big concert have company have introduced. So I'm just borrowing it, but having a safe word that you can use in a situation where you feel uncomfortable means that you do not have to explain yourself, which is very, very helpful. If you have a large enough group, like maybe like something like an AWS user group, you could establish a subgroup that does awareness full time. And then for every meeting, especially for hybrid meetings, assign an awareness person who can be there and take care of the people online and offline. And last but not least, like Jodana said earlier, a code of conduct is only as good as the enforcement is.  And yeah, that's, that's probably it's a well, well known concept in, in political groups. And I think it has a good place in open source communities. Okay, apparently there's a closed caption button, which I don't know. Sorry. Okay, well, if you're the trans, it will be transcribed if you go online. I'm so sorry, I really don't see where that is without actually going to YouTube. So here's Jodana. I'll continue by adding a few things to great points. Chris just made about awareness. We should be aware of our role when we're in situations. When we're acting as a facilitator or moderator, it's important for us not to project onto others. Not about us or centering our feelings or bringing it into in our own issues. It's about understanding the situation first and foremost. Our role is important in fostering safe spaces in order to foster effective communication. So we should aim to be neutral and gather information. We should also be mindful of the effects of things like the roles of the people involved, if there are power dynamics at play, language barriers, and that everyone can have different, sometimes conflicting perceptions and assumptions. The focus is on listening to learn with an open heart and open mind. But we are inherently flawed. We all have biases and our perceptions colored by our emotions, our situation, and our experiences. Take, for example, the actor-observer bias. We tend to explain our own behavior differently than how an observer would explain the exact same behavior. This changes how we form judgments and assumptions about why people behave in certain ways. So mistakes happen. We're going to get it wrong. It's what we do after that matters. We should take responsibility for the impact our words or actions have, because even if we had the best of intentions, it does not erase the negative impact we cause. So we should practice, and it's in the word practice, practice, practice, practice. We should practice patience, empathy, compassion, and grace for ourselves and for others. Remembering and being aware of these things greatly aids us in communicating more effectively. Nisa will be going over one communication process that explains how awareness and intent can affect communication. Okay. So nonviolent communication, this is the question that came up at the last KubeCon that we decided to take a whole presentation pretty much to address. It's one of the tools that we're offering here that you can follow up on. There's links and lots of URLs, and we have a resource slide in the back, and we have QR codes. So there's lots of places because the stock is about practical tools that you can use, and there's a lot of takeaways. So this will be very much an overview. But just for those of us, particularly in the U.S., nonviolent communication is commonly referred to also as compassionate communication, because violence or violent has connotations here that can trigger, that can make you think of something else, you know, just incredibly negative. So we want to be clear that this practice is something that we're, it's a very established practice, and it's practiced all over the world. And violent communication isn't necessarily malvalent. Most of the time it's just, it's automatic, it's habitual. But today we're going to talk about the process through which we can learn to express ourselves clearly, honestly, and while listening to our needs, and the needs of others. And these are all very specific parts of the practice. So I'm not changing the language because it's incredibly deliberate. So nonviolent communication is a process of communication that was established by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. I brought a little eye candy. I'm a book person. Also, I like to scribble. You should see this is my copy of this. It's dog-eared and scribbled all over. But it's a really, it's an amazing practice. It's a compilation of ideas about compassionate human behavior packaged to meet modern needs. Dr. Rosenberg, I'm going to quote him here, because I want to get this right. Dr. Rosenberg refers to nonviolent communication as the language of compassion. He declares it to be an ongoing reminder to keep our attention focused on a place where we are more likely to get what we are seeking. This is the important part for communities because we have to focus on the end game. There's a way to get there that works, and there's a way to get there that absolutely doesn't work, that just blocks communication. So the main point, it's focused on a place where we are most likely to get what we are seeking. And it's actually proven to have amazing results. You'll also find that on many levels, this can be game-changing, whether it's work, home, community. So it's not something that you would just do in one place and not do in another place. It's most effective if it's practiced consistently. It's also not easy. Like I said, most of our responses are habitual. They come out of an emotional place. It's not easy. It takes a deliberate attempt to break patterns of communication and establish new patterns. So I just would like to encourage folks that want to go down this road to really commit to it and try to put it in practice in every place in your life that you can. And that will, I guarantee you, help you when emotions are high and we're resolving conflicts in our communities, you'll have a better grasp of the tool if you've been using it. So the nonviolent communication process is based on four components. It's observations, feelings, needs, requests. And again, I'll go into that a little bit because those words might not be exactly how we're thinking of them. The concrete actions that we observe inherently tend to create emotions and feelings. And the trick here is to be able to articulate observations without any judgment or evaluation. So observations without judgment. They use the word stimulus here that's taken straight from the book and there's a reason for that. When you articulate observations, try and just say what happened. Present the simple facts. Judgments trigger emotions in other people. Simply stating observations opens the door for communications. For instance, I might say things in a couple of different ways. I might say, you weren't listening to me at all. You were on your phone that entire presentation. Or I might say, let's see, how could you say that? You could say something like, I noticed that you were on your phone through most of that presentation. And then you open the door for someone to say, yeah, I was live tweeting you. Yeah, what you were saying was so important, I was taking notes. Yeah, your co-presenter was telling you to turn the closed caption slides on on your presentation. So yes, apologies for being on the phone, but there's sometimes there's a reason to do it. And then you see, there was no reason for me to get upset. There was no reason for me to judge that other person or accuse them of something. So this is where the practice is. When you can put that type of language in practice, it just inherently opens the door for communication right away. And then you can say how that made you feel. So in nonviolent communication, what others say and do is considered the stimulus, but it's never the cause of the feeling. And this is important to kind of try and get our heads around. Um, only then, if you state things simply, you can get to your feelings, which then can help you identify the needs that you're that you're actually seeking that are connecting to those feelings. And maybe, maybe that's the other hardest part, because we know we're hurt, but we don't always tie that into what it is that we actually need. I mean, there's something that we need, which is causing the pain. And there's a way to get to what that is. Same with the other person, by the way. And so, you know, once you kind of acknowledge that step, then you can establish a concrete action that you can use to request whatever it is that you want. And so just put that in the form also of what you would like to have happen. Again, don't turn it around and say, well, you know, don't say what you don't want to do. You know, don't, what you don't want to have happen.  It's like, well, you know, I'd really love you to come home for dinner.  I mean, I think it's the same, it's the same purpose. So the formula for this, when A, I feel B, because I'm needing C, and therefore now I would like D. So that's kind of your, your sentence structure. And this is all, there's so much documented on this. But comparisons, really, really good, important, important point. Comparisons and judgments, please avoid at all costs. This is, this is so toxic. There was, there's this book by Dan Greenberg called How to Make Yourself Miserable. And he actually demonstrates in very humorous ways, the negative power of comparison, comparative thinking, and thinking that, you know, the, the negativity that can have on us. It immediately negates any opportunity for nonviolent communication, compassionate communication, and further healing. And a lot of it is because you're hurting yourself, right? You have to be compassionate to yourself. And then that opens the door also for compassion for other people. So please, I'm like, this comes out at conferences like this all the time, right? We talk about imposter syndrome, but then we go and we're seeing these presentations of people standing on stage who have done extraordinary things, of course they have, because they're on stage at KubeCon. And then they're talking about how they also had imposter syndrome. And you're looking at everything they've done, speaks all these languages, and learned, you know, the code from scratch after they got law degrees. And I'm totally picking on my dear friend and fellow CSF ambassador, Julia. You know, the things that people have done are extraordinary. That doesn't mean that what you have done is not extraordinary. We all have something to give, but if we start comparing ourselves to others, it's the first way to just dive off that cliff into depression. So please, don't do that. Don't judge others. Don't judge yourself, but definitely don't compare yourself to others. So we can all contribute. We can all get involved in the community. We can all join the community. I think if we have one more minute, okay. You have time. Because we put an extra, so those were the four main ones. But Chris and I talked about this, and he really liked this fifth bullet, which I can barely see, talking about taking personal responsibility for our actions. I do think this is a really, really important thing, especially in community, but in any type of conversations, if you have a denial of responsibility, and this generally happens when you're attributing the cause to factors that are outside of yourself. So I did this because I was told to. I did this because they made me do it. I did this because it violated a policy. Your child was expelled from school because he did this thing that violated this policy. This person was expelled from this community because they violated this policy. I'm not saying that you can't have really hard, fast rules about this, but if you're going to leave the doors open for compassionate communication and for learning experiences, regardless of what the outcome is going to be at the end, there's always a chance to keep the community together, all of the community, not just the person that did the thing, but all of the community. I'm sure there was a lot of other children at that school that were missing that kid who got expelled for the day. I'm sure there's people in this community that have felt that something's unfair. So if we have a denial of responsibility, then we completely take ourselves out of the action, and we hide behind these rules, these guidelines, I guess. But they're guidelines. They're things to be discussed. They're things to take into account, and they're things to start conversations and then decide what the correct action is in a way that you don't lose your community members, including the person that did the thing. That is one thing that they go through a lot, this offering to take personal responsibility for your actions and really owning what it is, and then leave the door open for compassionate communications. So the point is replace language that implies lack of choice with language that acknowledges choice. So nothing's ever yes and no or black and white, or you have to choose this or choose that, or you have to vote for this or for that, or if you put that on someone, it removes the chance for somebody to have a conversation, to maybe support both positions. That's what you should probably really try to avoid. Replace that language that gets rid of choice. And the last point, humans are very dangerous when we're not conscious of our responsibility for how we think, behave, and feel. That's a very dangerous position that human beings get in and causes or results in a lot of very destructive behavior. So that's just something to think about. Be conscious of our responsibility, take ownership, because we're going to only control ourselves. Really own it. And I think you'll find it opens the door to communication. I'd like to go over some techniques and tips on how to implement some of what we've discussed so far. Our roles are generally going to be to moderate, facilitate, and de-escalate. So it's important for us to set and maintain the tone and set clear expectation. Set the goals, boundaries, and clear expected and accepted behavior. Everyone, and yes that means us too, should adhere to. We should strive to be non-judgmental, calm, and neutral. This can start with don't assume malice or malintent, which I prefer over assuming good intent, which can sometimes be problematic. Because a lot of the times people are unaware of the negative impact of their words and actions. So remember the goal. It's about bringing that awareness to them in a way that they are open and willing to listen, understand, and learn. This is why it's so important for us to create a space for people to be honest and vulnerable. We can also do this by putting the focus on the words and actions, not on the person themselves. Behavior versus personality.  We should also ask questions about experiences and behavior without adding judgments, conclusions, or assumptions to our statements. So an example would be, you're very quiet right now. Are you listening? Do you care? Judgments, conclusions, and assumptions. Versus, you're very quiet right now. Can you let me know what you're thinking? Much more neutral. So everyone involved should try to listen to understand and listen to learn. Dr. Stephen Cubby said, most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. One of the most important things I personally always try to keep in my mind and in life is seek first to understand, then be understood. So to recap, I'll go over a few tips and reminders when dealing with difficult conversations or conflicts. I'd like us to remember the motivations. What are the goals and preferred outcomes? Make sure the expectations and agreements are clear to everyone. Intent does not equal or erase impact. And we should be mindful of our own biases and perception. This is why I recommend to try to have at least two preferably diverse people as moderators are on your photocon of the portion. Remember, we are all fallible. We need to be aware of this so that we are open for feedback and open to learn. Mistakes are human. It's what happens after that matters. Take responsibility, learn and grow, and pass on that knowledge if you're able. We're never going to get things perfect every time, but we can correct, teach and learn. This is why we should strive for connection over perfection. Renee Brown defined connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued. When they can give and receive without judgment and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship. We should meet people where they are. We should make accommodations for people so that they can feel comfortable and effective communication can take place. This can mean making accommodations for things like language, cultural, culture, neurodiversity and disability. Should we have a translator? Do they prefer to discuss things asynchronously or without video? Is there captioning available? We can sometimes miss important information if we don't have the language or cultural context. So we all have our own lived experiences and perceptions which give us each our unique and different operating systems.  So remember to find support and take care of ourselves and others. Do this before it becomes a necessity, before burnout. If we don't take care of ourselves, we won't be able to do this work properly and without burning out. We cannot pour from an empty cup. We've added a few resources. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and if you have links you would like to share, please reach out and we'll update the slides. We would love to hear from you. Our last slide shows how to connect with us if you'd like to discuss, have questions or feedback. I'm also on the CNTF Slack, so feel free to reach out. Again, I am so gutted to not be there in person, but hopefully we'll have parrot. I appreciate you and sending you love. Thank you. The amazing Jordana Phong. Thank you so much, Jordana. I'm trying to work through all these hoops to get these things rolling. Yes, we have these resources. Like I said, all the slides are available. This is a way to get in touch with us. Did you have another slide? Nope. Nope. Oh yeah, make sure you do this. We can take a couple questions too because our time is up. Happy to take questions and Jordana will hear your questions if they're for her. She can text me the answer, or we can get her really quickly on a what's app. Take a picture of this. This takes you directly to the feedback for our talk. I think there's a bug in the system. And if you don't click the happy face on this talk, it doesn't actually work. So make sure you click choose wisely. I'm just kidding. We love your feedback. I don't know if we get feedback, but if you type things in, but if you really want to make sure we have feedback, I'm at Lisa on CSF Slack. Yeah, I don't think you're on CSF Slack, but there's lots of ways. Okay, everybody get that. We'll put our other slide back up. And in the meantime, we will take some questions. Did someone have one? There's a microphone here to be recorded for all the world and the people on the live stream. Yes, sir. Awesome, awesome. Do you know of any training that's available for awareness monitoring? Training for awareness monitoring. Like, can you expand on that question a little bit? Awareness of what? Like we were talking about in the slides, awareness, you know, for meetings and community spaces and that sort of thing. Okay. Like there's some trainings and stuff that are available for code of conduct, et cetera. But I haven't seen anything for that. Oh, for awareness. Oh, you have a link on your, that was your slide, right? Yeah. I could put you in contact with good trainers where I live, which would probably not be that helpful. But we do have, if you look for nonviolent communication, there are very good courses out there. They're usually... The bottom one here, where are you based? Okay. Just in general, yeah, that bottom one actually has a physical location in San Francisco. So they do some classes, but I think most of these things are generally online. Yes. Like in Europe, I will be able to point you because there is some very good training around and relatively good workshops, but I don't have anything here. Sorry. Well, maybe they, they, he can write to somebody in Europe and say, who's your counterpart in the US? Okay. Any other questions? Yes. Thanks for the talk. That's really good. I'm glad we're having these conversations in tech because they're super important. My question for you guys would be like, do you find it helpful in communities? Because you're talking about like, practice, practice, practice is the name of the game. And I didn't think that was what the last question was about. Is it, have you found it like people practice on their own to kind of be like in an open source community, kind of leave it to other people to do self-paced learning? Or like, do you think it would be helpful to have, you know, someone be like, okay, like today, you know, like the last Friday of every month, we're going to get together and do some practice together, you know, about like communication or we're going to practice like awareness and things like that. Yeah. Back in the days, we both came out of the OpenStack community many years ago and we actually had something like that within each project because there were so many different projects and we really incurred, we had a working group that kind of like resided over all of it that a few of us were in, but we also had for each individual project we wanted to get ahead of it because we had, you know, losing some community members because of stuff that had happened and people didn't feel comfortable or just, you know, burnout or for whatever the reasons were. So we were encouraging each project to implement something like that so you meet every week, maybe one of those times a month or once a quarter, you're doing a small version of it and then encouraging people to go out and do more on their own. I do think you need to get ahead of it. It's kind of one of those things just like with diversity and so many other things. If you're not proactive about solving the problem, it doesn't solve itself. You know, all of these kind of difficult behaviors that we're talking about tend to unfortunately be the norm and that is a really, really hard thing because you don't get a lot of validation. So unless you're constantly practicing this, it's being negative reinforcement all the time.  So yes, Maya, I think, I mean, what do you think? Fully agree, especially if you're practicing nonviolent communication actually does take practice and nothing beats trying it in a group. Just do the four stanzas, try and go on. Nothing beats practice at that point. And if you're in a group and if you're absolutely new, invite someone to kind of seed someone who has done it before, invite him or her, and then go on from there. Yeah, absolutely. Unresolved problems do not resolve themselves as much as we'd like them to. Those of us procrastinators. Thank you. Thank you. Sir, did you have a question you stood up for? Do you still have a question? Okay. Oh, okay. Sure. Anyone else? All right. Well, thank you for coming. Give yourselves a hand. It's a tough topic. Thank you for being here. Great to meet all of you.


2020 revenue. All right, so this was a very interesting year to say the least. So at the beginning of 2020, I had around 7,000 or so subscribers on YouTube and 6,000 of those I gained in the last month and a half or so of 2019. So on November 10th, I got monetized and my channel pretty much just took off after that. And as you can see over the last year, I've gained just a few subscribers since then. And I did a poll a while back where I asked everyone if they thought I should do an income video where I show how much money I make on YouTube. So around 58% of you said yes, 26% said it depends and most of the comments just said, only do the video if you feel comfortable doing it or if you want to. But a lot of them kind of hinted at, yeah, we kind of wanna see. However, 16% of people said that they don't wanna see a video like this. And because of that, because of the fact that the illness struck and a lot of people ended up losing their jobs, losing their businesses and being in a bad place financially, I thought it would be a little bit tone deaf for me to post a video like that. And so I didn't. But I realized that watching videos like this in the past inspired me and helped me get to this point. And so for that reason, I decided to do it anyways. And if you're one of those people, one of the 16% that doesn't wanna see this, then please just go ahead and click off now. And yes, I realized the irony. It's pretty much a meme at this point of creators, making millions of dollars, talking about how they make millions of dollars. But the videos I've seen from Graham Stephan, Shelby Church, Nato Bryan, et cetera, just to mention a few of them revealing how much they make on YouTube and their journey in order to get to that point, inspired me and helped me out so much in my personal journey. And a lot of people leave these videos inspired, motivated and feeling a lot less guilty about using Adblock. And I don't wanna get too woo-woo here, but there really is something to this a lot of the time.  That's why nobody was able to run a four minute mile until 1954 when Roger Bannister did it. And it was incredible because nobody thought it was possible for hundreds of years. And then 46 days later, someone else ran a four minute mile as well. And then within a few decades, thousands of people had also run under four minutes. And now it's not uncommon to see high schoolers do it. And you know, I'm not special. And I thought it was impossible as well until I saw other people do it. And thank goodness some of these YouTubers were extremely transparent because it inspired me to try myself. And so hopefully I'm also able to inspire a few people with this video as well. Okay, so first, just as an experiment, I'm gonna go to Social Blade and they like to estimate how much creators make. And we're gonna see if that's accurate. Okay, so according to Social Blade, I make around 2.4,000 to 38,000 a year. And I make around 198 to 3.2,000 per month. And they think that on an average day, I'm making around like eight to $121 a day on YouTube.  Okay, so you see that on January 1, 2020, I had 7,190 subscribers. So in one year, I went from around 7,000 subscribers to about 110,000 or so. So it was over 100,000 subscribers in one year. And I am just like, it's super grateful for that. I mean, I did not expect it to be that good. That it's just beyond my wildest expectations. Now, if you go back to 2019, you'll see that around like July, here's a week where I gained zero subscribers, right? One week I gained 14 subscribers. So that was like two a day, another week zero, another week zero, 156. So basically I got pretty serious about YouTube around this time. Like I started uploading regularly around this time, whereas before I was kind of just uploading a video here and there and it was mostly just for fun and I wasn't really taking it seriously. And you can see that I start consistently, getting more and more subscribers, 19, 26, 51. It's going up and up and up and up and up. And then all of a sudden, the algorithm takes off right after I get monetized.  So this was several months. And I actually uploaded videos before that. I think I kind of started taking it seriously. In like May or June, somewhere around there. And I wasn't really getting much traction. So there were many months there where I just pretty much wasn't getting any views from the videos that I was uploading. And technically the first video I ever uploaded was back in 2017 and it was just kind of a joke video. And I ended up deleting it later on because it was so bad. But yeah, if you go back far enough, you can see that I'm not really getting any views in all of 2017. And then I start getting like a couple views a day. I think that's when I uploaded the joke video. I think somebody ended up posting it to Reddit or something like that. And I got a couple more views. There was one day where it got 100. That was pretty exciting. One day where it got 400. I think that's when it got posted to Reddit. And actually I was the one sharing it on Reddit but then somebody else saw it there and posted it on a different subreddit. And so that's when it kind of blew up and got like a couple hundred views. But then you see here that I stopped posting and my videos are only getting, you know, one to 10 views a day all the way through 2018. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then finally around April of 2019 I decided to start uploading more videos. Upload some videos here. I think one or two and they do decently well but it's kind of sporadic. And then a long time of just getting a few views a day. Same thing, same thing. And then around this time, June, July, somewhere around there is when I started getting relatively, you know, a regular schedule of uploading like one video a week. And you can see the channel does way better when you're regularly uploading. And then all of a sudden, you know, after doing that for a while I get to a thousand subscribers finally in November and the algorithm just picks me up. So for all of you smaller creators out there just keep grinding, keep grinding. There's gonna be a long period of time probably somewhere between three months to a year where you're not really seeing much of any results. But eventually, especially after you get monetized the algorithm will pick your channel up. And it makes sense because, you know they're making money and you're making money at the same time after you're monetized. So it's kind of incentivizes them to show your videos more. And then yeah, this entire year has been pretty good. I had a few dips here and there when I kind of stopped uploading as much after I did like 30 day challenges, I would take a break. But yeah, it's been pretty consistent. It's just been going up and up and up. Okay. And like I said, I got monetized on November 10th and my very first day being monetized I made a dollar and 27 cents, awesome.  I mean, it's awesome because it's pretty much just passive at that point. And then I have an amazing day where I make like $21 and the next day I make $44 around December. Usually in December, they kind of like all the companies will just dump their marketing budget into advertising. And so you tend to make more money overall at the end of the year kind of goes down a little bit and then boom, towards the end of the year, I just absolutely takes off. I have some days where I make like $180, $300, $130, $101. It's just, it's amazing. So all in all in 2019, I made $2,600 from YouTube. So if you count up all the hours that I worked it's around 500 hours or so of making videos, doing research, writing scripts, et cetera. And so I pretty much was earning around $5 per hour from YouTube in 2019. And that is less than minimum wage here in the United States. Now one of my favorite quotes is if you award failure you're gonna end up awarding success. And basically what that means is you're gonna fail over and over and over again and when you keep failing eventually you will get success. There's always that one video that's gonna break out that one video that just is a total game changer that's going to change your channel. When I was first posting all my videos would get like a hundred views max. And I thought, oh man, they're really bad but when I had that one video break out it made a stream of views go to pretty much all of my other ones and many of them end up getting like 10,000, 20,000 views. And that's like a year later but still they ended up getting a lot of views just because of the fact that people were interested in my content. And one thing I would like to note here is when my channel broke out was initially when I did my first 30 day challenge. Now I failed this challenge. You know, I was trying to upload a video a day for 30 days and I failed this challenge. It was something I think it was kind of like I saw Gary V thing where he was just like upload a video a day. And so I'm like, all right, I'll try it. Why not? 30 day challenge. And that is when my channel took off. Now these videos were not the best videos. In fact, a lot of them were really, really bad. I was still in the learning process. I didn't know how to use a camera. I'm really bad when it comes to like technology and cameras and stuff. So it took me a long time to learn how to use it properly. Some of my older videos have awful lighting, awful sound, et cetera. But I ended up failing the challenge around halfway through or so. I kind of got a little bit sick. And so I think I uploaded 20 videos that month instead of 30. But you know, around, you know, the 15 day mark, you can kind of see here, I start making a lot more money around like the halfway mark or so. And I think doing 30 day challenges, especially when your channel is small can really kickstart the algorithm. I continue to do 30 day challenges even after that. And they can still be pretty good. I noticed that you do end up getting more views. But when your channel gets to a certain point, you need to start focusing more on quality rather than quantity. But in my opinion, when your channel's small, you should really just focus on quantity. And there's a YouTuber I really like. His name is Roberto Blake. And basically he said one time in one of his videos, just make 52 bad videos. One video week, you know, 52 weeks in a year, make 52 really bad videos and see what happens. And through this process of making videos, even if you don't think people are gonna be interested in what you have to say, and you know, just put your opinion out there, give it your own perspective. And in this process of making all these videos, you're going to learn how to be a good YouTuber, okay? You're gonna learn how to make better videos whether you try or not. Because eventually you're gonna get bored making bad videos. You're gonna see the same comments over and over again.  I mean, it took me a long time to figure that out, but I had really bad lighting for a long time on this channel. The most important thing when it comes to a video like blowing up is the topic. And so you can make the best video with the highest quality, spend like 100 hours on it. But if nobody's interested in the topic, it's not going to do all that well. However, you can make a video where the sound's not great, the lighting's not great, you're using a potato for a camera like I was for a long time. And if the topic is interesting, if it's a topic that people really want to hear about, the video will likely do well. It might take a while for the algorithm to pick it up. In my case, it took several months for one of my videos to start blowing up. It was the top five college degrees that are actually worth it. That was my first banger video. I think it has over a million views now. But if the topic is interesting, people want to hear about it and there's not enough people on YouTube talking about it. Eventually the algorithm will pick it up. Now you might be wondering here, Shane, how do you upload a video a day for 30 days while you have a full-time job as a legal drug dealer? Well, my secret to this, and I haven't told anybody up until now, the answer is onions. Don't believe me? Think I'm making it up? Well, it makes you stronger. It increases your testosterone and other things. That's right. If you're not eating at least 10 raw uncooked onions a day, then you are bound to fail. That's right. Oh my God! Yeah, I feel so manly now. Ready to grind for 36 hours straight and pump out like 10 videos.  Oh my God, this is so bad. No, that was obviously a joke. The real secret is basically what I just did right there. So I did something to illustrate what the secret is. The secret is to basically have your own unique personality and your own unique brand of humor. So my channel is obviously an educational channel and specifically we talk about personal finance. What I noticed when I watched a lot of these personal finance videos is they were way too serious and just uptight and stuff like that and they didn't have very much humor in them. And there's a lot of people out there that would be interested in getting into personal finance but they just don't find it entertaining enough and they kind of just get bored hearing somebody lecture them about why they should sign up for a 401K and a Roth IRA. So basically what I did is I talked about a lot of these topics that I thought were really important but I did it in such a way where I showcase my sense of humor and my personality. So basically you wanna provide quality content but add a little bit of entertainment and a little bit of spice in there as well.  And obviously not every person is gonna want comedy. Some people really just do want like a step-by-step video without any comedy, any entertainment or personal perspective, they just want like a robotic step-by-step type of video and that's fine. But I have noticed that overall most of the time when you see these types of videos on YouTube, they don't end up doing very well. So my personal brand is providing really good well research content and then sprinkling in a little bit of entertainment and maybe a little bit of cringe in there as well. And a man can only handle so much cringe in a lifetime. So by my course today, onion eating Chad Baster only $1997.  And the way I think about this is like swinging a bat. So, you know, if you look at the greatest, you know, home run hitter of all time, the person who hit the ball more than anybody else I believe it's Ty Cobb and he hit it around 36% of the time. So even the best of the best, one of the greatest of all time only hit the ball when they were swinging the bat around 36% of the time. So most of your videos are going to miss. No matter how good you are, no matter how skilled you are most of your videos are not going to hit unless you're Mr. Beast. That's okay though, you just have to keep going and eventually you will succeed, you will hit a home run. And there's that saying that a rising tide raises all ships so when one video hits all of your other videos you're going to get a bunch of views to them as well. So I would say just commit to posting at least 30 videos that you think people might find interesting and there's a very good chance that one of them is going to blow up. Okay, so now for 2020. So I'm around 7,000 subscribers and we're going to go month by month all through 2020. You can see exactly how much I made. All right, so January 2020 started off made around $87 in a day, 145, 160. This was all like really amazing. I mean, I'm really happy about this. My best day in January was the sixth and it was $179 in a day. Overall, I made around $3,000 in January. Now, one thing that's very interesting is a playback based CPM is basically how much money you make per 1,000 views. So that's $13 per 1,000 views that I made in the month of January. Now, when you look at videos like this from finance YouTubers, you're going to see comments that are just like, bro, your ad rights are crazy. And to be honest with you, there's certain sections, certain niches that have ad rates that are like $50 CPM, okay? Sometimes even more than that. And if you don't believe me, just wait a few minutes because I'm going to show you. And as you see with a lot of creators, they actually target these really high paying niches. We're talking like credit cards, stocks, e-commerce, that sort of thing. And my channel is a personal finance channel but it's definitely on the lower side of things just because of the fact that I don't make a ton of videos about stocks or credit cards. I just make videos here and there because I think that it would be redundant if I just made lots of content about credit cards. I'm just going to tell you which ones I think are the best and that's that. I can't see myself making any more than like five credit card videos in a year and even that would be a stretch. And for me, I just like to make the videos that I think give the most value and the ones that my viewers want to see. And a lot of the times those are not going to be videos that have the higher CPMs. So in February, the revenue went down a little bit around $3,000. I wasn't posting as consistently. I think I was maybe doing two videos a week-ish but I probably missed here and there. In March, it went back up just a little bit. You know, $2,900. My best day was around $177. In April, it went up just a little bit more around $3,000 in a month. And it was pretty consistent. I didn't have any like really amazing days. It was basically just consistently like $100 a day. In May, we had a big jump. So $5,600 in a month. And that is, I mean, that's amazing because that's like, I think that's above average for the full-time income of people here in the United States even with a college degree. And so, I mean, that's amazing. This is a side hustle and it turned into a full-time income in May. My best day here was around $241. And you can kind of see, they show the videos here at the bottom. This is when I started uploading consistently three videos a week, okay? So, the more consistent you get, the better. When I started uploading three videos a week consistently, that's when the channel started doing really, really well. In June, it got even better, jumped up to about $7,000 in a month. And my best day was a little over $300. So, you know, that's pretty amazing. I also got 11,000 subscribers that month which was a record at the time. And another thing to note about June is as you see down here, I did another 30-day challenge in June and I actually completed it. So, you know, some of these videos, I think I ended up deleting them because it didn't do very well. But, you know, I posted a video every single day for 30 days and I completed it. And as you can see, there was a pretty big reward when it comes to how much money I made and also how many subscribers I got.  I think I was probably like 30,000 subscribers somewhere around there.  I think it's a fantastic idea. I will probably never do a 30-day challenge again just because of the fact that, you know, I'm 100,000 subscribers now and I think the algorithm wants me to just upload kind of like quality videos at this point. But when you're trying to figure out what types of videos you want to upload, what types of videos people like, all kinds of different things. When you're trying to learn how to make videos, I think 30-day challenges are the best thing that you can possibly do. Maybe you don't do 30 days. Maybe you just try it, you know, with a 10-day challenge. Something like that. But it can be absolutely amazing to just upload a video for 30 days. Don't worry too much about the sound or the lighting or anything like that. Just talk about interesting topics. Now, if you look at July, you see I think I uploaded maybe six or seven videos the entire month. So, you know, I was a little burned out after June doing a video a day. And so I wasn't as consistent in July. But, you know, the cool thing is it didn't actually go down all that much. I still made $6,000. A lot of this is just kind of somewhat passive. So my videos continued to get views all the way through July, even though I wasn't uploading nearly as often. And then August happened. And this was just an incredible month. So I got back to uploading regularly in August. I think I did three videos a week all throughout August. I probably deleted one of them. But I got 1.2 million views and I made $12,439 in August. My best day was August 6th at $528 in a single day. And if you look at the CPM, it's starting to rise. So it's starting to get higher in August, you know? It's like $17 on average per day CPM. And before it was only $13. So it's starting to get higher. And you'll notice this towards the end of the year. It just starts going, you know, up and up and up. In September, the revenue did go down a little bit. I got less views and it went down. But still really good, $11,000. I mean, that's way higher than it was before. And my best day in September was around $502 on the 23rd. And also if you look at the playback based CPM, it's $20.96 in September. So basically what I think happened here is companies kind of work on a quarterly basis. They've got Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And at the end of each quarter they kind of just dump their ad budget. So at the end of the year, they really dump their ad budget. But at the end of each quarter, they also dump it into ads. And so you see the CPMs going up just because all the companies are doing it at the same time. And so in the last 30 days of the quarter, Q3, which would be September, they really increased the ad budget. So there was one day here, I think it was like $24.92 CPM on average. Now that is really good because, you know, if you look at like vlogging channels, for instance, a lot of the time you'll see their CPM is $1 to $3. And so a $20 CPM is fantastic. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's not nearly as good as like card to card channels and, you know, some of the e-commerce and things like that. But hey, I'm not complaining. $20 CPM is amazing. If you go to October, pretty much the same thing.  Best day was around $590. And then if you look at November, it goes up just a little bit more, $12,194. And my best day was 531. And then if you look at December, I did another 30 day challenge and I was able to complete this one as well. I already deleted some of the videos because they weren't very good and they didn't do very well. But, you know, what I learned here, and this was just, you know, last month, you know, 30 day challenges when your channel is bigger, it's not really gonna help all that much. Doing it early on when the YouTube algorithms trying to figure out what your channel is all about is fantastic because it helps the algorithm basically index your channel and figure out, you know, what types of advertisers are gonna, you know, advertise on your channel, et cetera, and what your channel is all about. But later on, when you're starting to get bigger, you really wanna start focusing on quality. And so for 2021, I'm gonna be all about quality. After I've done, you know, the videos that I've already recorded, I'm really gonna start focusing on, like, you know, doing videos in the new set and all that sort of thing. And I'm gonna try to make my videos as good as possible because not only is it more fun to make quality videos, but I think when your channel is a little bit bigger, it's also just better in general.  And I think the best day was like $468 on the seventh. And then if you look at the CPM, it was $22 throughout December. And the highest day, it looks like the highest day was $25 CPM. So, you know, really amazing CPM, especially towards the end of the year. So overall, a lifetime of my channel, it's made around $97,000. And, you know, this mostly just started in the last year or so. So, you know, I started making money in November, but I wasn't really taking it all that seriously.  And then in the last year, I made $97,000 on the channel. But yeah, you know, this, I'm extremely grateful for this. It was my best year ever. It was pretty much my first year uploading regularly on YouTube. And I mean, it was just an amazing year. You can't beat like day trading channels, stock channels, e-commerce channels. They make like $50 CPMs. Some of them you even see getting up over $100. I think the most insane one I saw was $300 CPM. But Shane, why don't you talk about stonks more? You know, I don't expect it to be this good next year. I think a lot of people were watching YouTube instead of doing other things because of the illness that's going on. People were spending a lot of time at home. So that probably has a lot to do with my success. And I'm not expecting it to do better next year. You know, I'm just tempering my expectations. If it does better, that's great. If it doesn't, then you know, that's great as well. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, you probably want to see some like exact videos. This was my best video ever. The most useless degrees. It got, you know, it made $13,000. Just one video made $13,000. It's been consistently making money for a long time. It's also gotten me, you know, 17,000 subscribers. This is a fantastic video. It also is one of my most controversial videos. This, out of all my videos, by far, this is the one that gets the most angry comments. And I can kind of see why I was a little bit harsh. In my opinion, I was kind of in a little bit of a mood that day when I made it, and I was a little bit harsh. And I've tried to kind of like tell people that, you know, hey, I'm not judging you if you got this degree or you like something like this. I'm just saying, probably not worth it to go $40,000 in debt for a degree like this. And that's kind of the nature of YouTube as well is kind of extreme content tends to do really well, controversial, extreme, dramatic content. I remember watching the actual YouTube creators channel and the guy who's the head of all of them, he's like in charge of all of them, he actually recommend drama, like creating drama as a way to grow your YouTube channel. So, I mean, hey, it is what it is, I guess. I try not to make too many videos like that, but they tend to do extremely well. This is my second best video ever, top five college degrees that are actually worth it. Something interesting to note about this one is when I first posted it, it did decently well. It got, you know, 500, 600 views. I think I posted it on like Reddit or something like that. And then somebody else started sharing it too. But if you look, the first 100 and first half a year that it was posted, it got less than 10,000 views, right? And then all of a sudden, when my channel got monetized, it just blows up. Boom, it blows up to over a million views.  And in reality, that doesn't always happen. So, you know, in the case of this video, it took half a year for the algorithm to pick it up. And overall, it made about $11,000 and it's still consistently getting quite a few views. So, you know, this has been a really good one. Another one I wanna look at really quickly is the stockbroker tier list. Now, this isn't one of my highest earning videos, but, you know, it earned around $2,200 or so, 2,300 almost, got around 60,000 views. But what I wanna show you is the CPM on this.  It's just, that's all I can describe it as. $62 CPM, this is the highest on my entire channel. So, you know, if I wanted to just make the most amount of money possible, I would just talk about stocks all the time. Like I would talk about stocks and stockbrokers and all that sort of thing. Clearly that is the way to make the most money. $62 CPMs, but I probably make, I don't know, around maybe 10 videos a year that are related to stocks and like stockbrokers and all that sort of thing because I think that I would just be a little bit redundant and I would just be saying the same things over and over again. And my channel is a little bit more focused on careers, college degrees and personal finance in general, rather than just focusing on stocks. So yeah, that's it, I'm trying to rack my brain for any other possible things you would wanna see. If there's anything that I didn't include here that you guys wanna see, just mention it down below. And when I do this, maybe next year or later on this year, maybe I'll do it again. I will include all of those things that you wanna see. Yeah, you know, I'm an open book. There's nothing I'm not gonna share with you guys. You know, anything you ask me, I'll be willing to show you. I mean, maybe I wouldn't show you my tax returns. That's a little bit weird and I probably wouldn't give you my social security number but anything within reason that you guys ask for, I will show you on this channel. And yes, I know I'm gonna get this question because I get it at least once a day. I'm a full-time pharmacist. I work full-time as a pharmacist. This is something that I do on the side. I have not quit my job as a pharmacist and people always ask, you know, are you going to quit your job? Maybe, maybe I will, maybe I won't. You know, I really enjoy my job but, you know, YouTube is also really awesome as well and it might make more sense for me to go full-time on YouTube at some point so that I can spend more time making great content for you guys. And again, this is only meant to inspire. Please, you know, if you're in a desperate sort of situation, you're in a situation financially that's not very good right now, I can completely empathize with you. I have people in my family that have had to lay off all their employees and their business and it's just, it's heartbreaking to see and a lot of people are in a really bad situation right now and I really just want this to inspire you to see what's possible because there's nothing special about me. I'm just a nerd who likes memes and has a weird sense of humor and likes to post it on the internet and, you know, I also have a passion for personal finance as well. So, you know, there's nothing really all that special about me. I was in the same situation as a lot of you in terms of like, you know, making money online just a few years ago. I wasn't really making much money, you know. So I just hope this can be something that shows you guys what's possible and this, you know, this is something anybody can do. You know, a lot of the time it's gonna take consistent effort over a period of time. It's not one of those things where you blow up overnight. There's a few cases out there. I know Janelle Eliana, the girl in the van who has the snake or whatever, she grew up to a million subscribers in one month but that is the exception of the rule that almost never happens in real life.  And that's just me being realistic. I don't wanna say, hey, don't do it. I'm not trying to be a dream killer or anything like that. I just try to give you guys realistic advice. Usually it is gonna take a period of time before the algorithm will pick up your videos. But with that being said, if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below and eat out the comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. And before you leave, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.