Today, we're gonna talk about when men go silent in a relationship. Now I wanna differentiate silence between a temporary non-communication versus going into what's known as the silent treatment. I don't know if you were like me, my mother used to give me the silent treatment when I was growing up. Whenever my mother was upset with my father, was upset with my brother, she would virtually go silent. And as a little boy, I know that that was a terribly excruciating, it was very painful to have the person you love go silent. And that actually shaped my life as an adult. Whenever I don't experience communication on a regular basis, I go into a sense of fear, I go into a sense of anxiety. And while my rational mind knows that there's nothing wrong, the little kid inside of me feels like I did something wrong, okay? So if you've ever experienced this, if you can relate to this, please write a comment, let me know, I can relate to this. That's for people that go into the silent treatment. And those are people that typically need time to process their emotions. And for some people, that's their regulatory system to go. My mother used to go silent for 72, for three to four days, 72 hours, I was gonna say, or longer. Whereas some people might need a shorter period of time to process their emotions, each person is different, some people could go weeks. Okay, now let's talk about what it means in the dating, mating or relating realm. Those are, you know, what I talked about was a seasoned relationship with my mother, but what about those of you that are just beginning a relationship with a man? Okay, I'm gonna share something very personal and I'm not very proud of this. And I can vividly remember this time, before I got married, I met a woman, I think we met at a club. That, you know, does anyone remember actually meeting people in clubs or meeting in restaurants or bars versus our current methodology of meeting people? But I met this woman, we really hit it off, we went out on a date, we had a really good time, we went out on another date and we actually slept together, okay? And then for whatever reason, and she lived, she didn't live nearby. I mean, there was a little bit of a slut to get to her. I mean, it was about an hour drive, okay? For whatever reason, I wasn't up for seeing her again. I can't tell you why this happened. I can't tell you what caused me not to want to see her again. But I remember we had planned a date and I went MIA. I didn't call, I didn't do any, you know, I didn't, back then there was no text messaging. If I could have, I probably would have text message. But I blew her off and she called my house a couple of times, went into the answering machine. And for whatever reason, I was paralyzed to communicate with her. I literally remember being so afraid to say, I'm just not that into you anymore. And now looking back at it, I can see why this happened. I can see that now it was so inappropriate to have sex so early on with a person I didn't know very well, to have sex with someone that trust hasn't been built and certainly no commitment was built between us. I was operating the way I was taught that men are hunters and men love the chase. Well, ladies, when you hear this, that men are hunters and men love the chase, what is it that we're chasing? Are we chasing a fully committed relationship? Now, back in my 20s, I was, but for whatever reason, she wasn't the one. I finally did communicate with her and I gave some BS excuse, okay? How many men give BS excuses now? The number one BS excuse today that men give is I'm busy, busy, busy, I'm busy with work. I'm busy with my children, I'm busy with this, I'm busy with that. I am too busy to be in a relationship.   I'm just recognizing that one of the fundamental pieces that is missing in relationships today or for the most part, what I've observed is sex happens well before trust and commitment have been established. That's right, sex happens well before trust and commitment. Now, trust isn't just about fidelity. Trust is, can I count on this person to care about my feelings as much as my own? Does this person have my best interest at heart? And commitment is kind of a vague term today because quite frankly, it used to be if you wanted to have sex, you had to get married, okay? That was a full commitment. Now commitment could just be simply the agreement to monogamy and exclusivity. That's a form of commitment. You can call each other boyfriend and girlfriend and yet you can change your mind at any given time. So how do, so, all right, now let's go back to men going silent. In the early stage of dating, that's just a clear decision. You're not the one, okay? You're not the one. And I mean, and the fact is, is when we jump into bed quickly, we take the risk of jumping into bed with someone we haven't really established trust. And so when it happens really early in the dating process, that's the gamble we take or people take, okay? And this is true for women as well. Okay, I mean, I'm saying women can go silent on men as well. A woman could decide after sex she's not interested in a man. So it can go both ways. What happens when it's a seasoned relationship? In other words, you've been dating for three or four or five months. A man goes silent. Well, that's what I wanna lean into today. Now first, it's critically important that you've established a strong friendship by the third month mark. And by the third month, if you haven't accumulated 200 hours of face-to-face time with each other, okay, you haven't really developed the deep roots of trust with one another. And I know many of you are dancing in long distance relationships or you have long distance text relationships. I can't begin to tell you how many folks are in long distance text relationships with people believing it's a relationship. Look at it as Jay Shetty says, it takes about 40 hours of face-to-face time just to begin to get to know someone. I always say it takes 100 hours of face-to-face time just to build the first layer of trust and about 200 hours of face-to-face time to begin to develop a friendship. And by the way, this needs to happen in a short period of time because to establish those deep roots of trust, it's going to happen through social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends. So what happens is when you've established a solid friendship with one another, a man is less likely to go silent. So if he does go silent, it's most likely means he's processing his feelings about something and he doesn't know how to articulate it. And this is where you come in. You can simply say, and I've had clients do this, shoot out a text, simply saying, hey, Tim, just want you to know how much I appreciate you in our relationship. And yet at the same time, my gut is telling me that there's something that you're having a reservation with respects to us because I haven't heard from you. Is my gut telling me the truth? By taking an action and calling, I don't want to say calling them out, but inviting a conversation, you will most likely find 90% of men will actually respond with some level of truth. Now, most likely he'll give you the BS line, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. Okay, that's the narrative most human beings use is that I'm busy or there's things going, I've got challenges in my life. I got things going on with work, I got things going on with my kids. Okay, that's the typical narrative. This is why when you're actively in the dating marketplace, you have to establish what is the foundation of his life? Does his life feel solid? Now, when I mean by solid, I'm talking about physically solid, but more importantly, emotionally solid. So, if he's just gone through a contentious divorce, chances are he's not emotionally solid. If some woman broke up with him in the last year or two, there's a chance he might not be emotionally solid. Does he have issues going on at work? You have to determine is his life in a sense of chaos or is it, is the ground underneath him solid? And this isn't just physically solid, it's emotionally solid. You know, ladies, many of you find your, I recently in a video yesterday, I said how dating today is just a long strung out version of friends with benefits. But the reality is, is you're not really that friendly with each other. And I want you to think about a friend. A friend is there for you when something, when you need them.  You need a friendly person to talk to because you're feeling down. God dang it, my nose is at you because the fan is on. Now it just occurred to me why that happens. Okay, a friend is there for you in need.  When he might gen, he might care about you, but will he be there for you during the tough times? Folks, I'm here to establish an alternate way of approaching the dating process. And that is using my technique, I talk about my private coaching. By the way, here's a link to get a schedule a discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. Is first to establish your standards. Establish your standards. And most of you focus on what you don't want. And I'm here to say you really need clarity on who's truly compatible with you. And then in the early stage of dating, you adopt of what I call radical honesty, laying your cards on the table and the rules of engagement. The rules of engagement means to establish your standards, whatever that standard is. My standard was I was looking for a relationship where we spent three, four days, nights a week together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork building skills both in our personal and our professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy that led to either moving in together or getting married. Okay. Now, since I did a long distance relationship, there's a picture of my sweetheart and I, we went to a wedding from a couple that met on match.com and that's where Marie and I met was on match.com. We had long distance. So what did we do? We planned a lot of time together, a lot of time together. In fact, in a 90 day period, no, excuse me, in a hundred day period, we spent 45 days together. That was almost once every other day, cumulatively speaking. Okay. That's a lot of time together. We amassed over 200 hours of face to face time doing those social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends. And then we chose to move in together after five months. Okay. Folks, I'm here to say, spending a lot of time together in a concentrated period of time gives you a sense of who this person is.  Do you know what it's, it fascinates me how many women say honest communication is the most important thing in a relationship. And yet you are silent when it comes to speaking your truth. If you're not familiar with my book, what the heck is self love? Anyway, a journey of personal development, self love and spiritual work, there's a link below to get a copy of my book. While I'm sharing this with you as chapter one, speak your truth, just do it in a kind way. And chapter nine is if it's sincere and from the heart, you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. And yet many of you are silent because you're afraid to lose a guy if you ask for more. Guess what? Asking for more is usually just asking to come to the 50 yard line. I want you to think about this for a second.  You're just asking him to meet you at the 50 yard line, but many of you believe like, oh my God, that's asking for way too much, it will scare him away. I'm here to say you want to scare the wrong guys away by speaking up. And yet many of you are also silent on speaking up. So this isn't singular to men, why men go silent. You go silent as well by not speaking up. This is a human behavior thing. Because the reality is is humans fear intimacy, humans fear, not fear intimacy. And I'm talking about emotional intimacy. Many humans are emotionally constipated. And in addition, they are unfamiliar with what intimacy is. If you're not familiar with the book, Emotional Intimacy by Robert Masters, I highly recommend reading this book so you can understand intimacy. In addition, I highly recommend getting two more books. Read the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, so you can learn how to communicate your feelings in a way that can be seen, heard and understood. But Jonathan, all you do is recommend books. Look, I'm not the expert in all this stuff. I'm just here to espouse what I've learned over the years that actually helps people. And these books are great resources for helping you become a better version of yourself. Listen, this isn't easy. Dating isn't easy. It's incredibly hard. Do you know what dating is? Dating is a vetting process to determine if it makes sense to explore a relationship with someone. In fact, I invite you all. Can you make a promise to me right now? Jonathan, I am gonna become my own matchmaker right now. I'm gonna do a better job of vetting a person early on. But Jonathan, I'm told I'm not supposed to interview men. You have every right to ask as many questions as you see fit if this person is pursuing you sexually. Even if he's pursuing you non-sexually, you have every right to ask as many questions as you want.  Let me just say this. You're only scaring a guy who's not legit. Does that really matter if he's not legit?  Do you care that it's a turn off? Look it, I understand dating is a dance. And we have to operate from a place of being both interesting and interested. Developing a sense of attraction. I get that. That's important too. This is why a lot of this can happen on the telephone somewhere between either before the first date but certainly before having sex with someone. You have every right to... So let me say when I talk about radical honesty laying on your carrots on the table and rules of engagement. The rules of engagement is to express to a man what are the standards you seek for being in a relationship with someone?  Well, ask him, what does that mean to him? And what does it more importantly look like for him? Actually pull out, say, okay, great. I want a long-term relationship too. Well, listen, before you get to get inside my panties here's a calendar, an old-fashioned calendar. Show me how dating will look for you during this period of time. Number one, what does it look like for you? How often do you wanna see someone? Ask him these questions. And more importantly, ask him how long it takes for him to build trust with someone. He's gonna go, I don't know, Shaggy, I don't know. Yeah, cause men are rather clueless. So you establish your standard, that's the rules of engagement before you get physically intimate someone. You do the laying your cards on the table. You find out as much as you can about this person's past relationship experience. You be a detective. You be an interrogator. And I don't mean you interrogate someone. It's a conversation, it's not a confrontation. Okay, but you ask as much and radical honesty saying, look, I operate from vulnerability, authenticity and transparency. Is this sinking in, folks? Please let me know if this is sinking in. I invite you all to start changing how you begin the dating process at the same time. If a man does go silent on you, you simply ask him in a very nonviolent way. By the way, it's called nonviolent because we oftentimes have a confrontational way of communicating, but I invite you all to ask in a very compassionate way. I feel you pulling, my gut is telling me you're pulling back, is my gut right? I'm gonna share with one last story and then we'll jump into Q and A. So I was briefly in a relationship a couple of years before I met Marie. And it was some woman I liked, but I had my doubts, okay? I was like, I wasn't feeling like we were that close, but I recognize it takes time to get to know someone. And sure enough, in three weeks after we saw each other about 10 times, she only lived three or four miles away from me, I just got this sense that we weren't right for each other. So I pulled back a little bit and I just didn't plan a date. I didn't initiate conversation. And she reached out and said, hey, I noticed you pulling back, what's up? Then it created an opportunity for me to say, I'm just not feeling it. See, here's the thing, folks, sometimes, we just don't know why we don't feel it. It's the thing is love is this intangible. Now a lot of times love is based on childhood wounds and traumas and we oftentimes choose the wrong people for us because we're reliving a childhood wound or trauma. But the reality is that many of us don't know what it's like to be with somebody who genuinely loves you and you genuinely love them. So as we're in this dance of dating, we're oftentimes just clueless and we're uncertain, but what we are certain is if it doesn't feel right, we pull back, that's just a natural thing. Doesn't make any wrong or bad, it just makes them a human being. And in that particular case, when she opened up the door, created a conversation and we ended the relationship. No harm, no foul, we'll do it civilly. And that's ideally what you'd like to have happen if it's not the one that's gonna go the distance. All right, I hope this content resonated with you. I hope it did. If it did, please hit that like button. Please share this video. Please subscribe to my channel in the description below or links to schedule a discovery call with me to join my group called Midlife Love Mastery to follow me on Instagram to get a copy of my book. And again, if you're watching the replay, please hit that super thanks button to give some love and post a comment below. All right, now it's time for Q&A. If you have a question of me, write the word question then post the question there after or you can purchase a super sticker, super thanks. All the monies from the sticker, super thanks. There's a little dollar sign in the chat box goes to a scholarship fund in the name of my son, Connor Asley. That's a picture of him right there. That's my son who passed away almost five years ago. And in his honor, I donate to causes like the Hoffman Process and Insight Institute, just to name a few. Hey, I wanna give a shout out to one of our members here. Leaf is in the house. I wanna just give her a shout out. These are folks who have joined. If you'd like to be part of my community on YouTube, there's a little join button right by the share button. Join the community. You'll get shout outs and get some love and you'll have private messages as well. All right, let's see what kind of questions we have. Jennifer wrote a comment. I have had guys regret leaving me and I don't take people back. I move on and tell them they lost out on a great woman. Why do men come back? I think when we've experienced someone that we like, but they're not the one, we often feel like we can come back to them because a lot of men just assume women are weak. Jennifer, I'm very proud of you. Now my hope is this isn't a situation where he was genuinely remorseful and there was a real significant established relationship between the two of you. You may want to revisit it, but I understand where you're coming from and you're staying in your power. So well done, Jennifer. Dawn says, you're priceless, Jonathan. I like your character. Well, I appreciate that.  Some people need to be put in their place if they are inappropriate, offensive or rude. So I can personally relate to this. I went out with a woman on a first date and it turns out I had alcohol poisoning. I didn't know this until after the fact, but during the date, turns out, oh, well, I thought we had this really good time. We went out and had drinks. We had a good time. I went home.  I'm like, what are you talking about?  I'm like, whoa, what happened? Then I had a major hangover that day. And as I reflected back what possibly could happen because in a sense I was blacked out and no memory of it, I believe I had alcohol poisoning. Maybe I had a roofie for all I know. But I had alcohol poisoning in that I was really susceptible to the alcohol. I only remember having three drinks but if I acted drunk and belligerent, I was unaware of it. I apologized to her and then nothing happened. Then some years later, she popped up on my Facebook feed and I reached out and I apologized again. It was very significant that that, and she told me off. And I remember by her telling me off, I actually became more mindful of my drinking. And since then, I am very conscious of alcohol and I only allow myself, the max is three drinks, but usually whenever I drink, I only have one or two drinks now and my friends all think I'm a tea totaler because she told me off. So I'm grateful for that experience. It actually was a wake up call. So sometimes we do need to be told off, hopefully in a nonviolent way, okay? So Jennifer, thank you for posting that. It gave me a chance to share that experience. All right, let's keep swimming here. I like your accent. I was born in the United States. I didn't know I had an accent. Let's see, question about, okay. Someone wrote a question, bear with me. Oh, cupcake, Betty says, you have great stories. Thanks for elaborating. Okay, I don't see a question. By the way, if you have a question folks, write the word question and post the question thereafter. It's easier for me to find. These are sometimes very hard for me to find. Oh, here we go.  It still keeps my stuff. He won't respond to my texts or calls. This sounds like a person you need to block from your life. I mean, and if he has your stuff, listen, I would say things are replaceable. Things are replaceable. Now sometimes we have things that aren't replaceable. And I get that this really sucks, but it's more important to salvage your emotional wellbeing versus your physical things. That's my quick two cents on that one. Block this person from your life. And if you have to go to the police, if this person is crossing boundaries, go to the police, get a restraining order, maybe you could seek legal counsel to get your things back. I know it's a challenging thing, but there's not much you can do with an irrational person. You're going to have to use different means with an irrational person. So thank you so much for posting. Let's see, if you have a question, write the word question. Let's see. Okay, here we go. Sheila writes, question. Where can a guy get, wait, where can a guy get relationship health about vetting women? I share your videos with them. So there are a lot of workshops that people can go to that is for relationships. For example, Barbara DeAngelis, I don't think she still does it, but I would check out her website. Barbara DeAngelis wrote the book, Making Love All the Time. She does workshops for both men and women. I would say going to workshops that are designed for couples and actually listening to the experiences, going to, by the way, Google nonviolent, or do me a favor, go to YouTube and type in nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Type in all the books I recommend in YouTube. There are videos there that can help people learn from the inside out to be better, more emotionally stable human beings. That would be a couple of the suggestions I'd have for men or contact me for private coaching. Rachel says, have you ever caught yourself expecting too much from a partner and realized it? When it happened, were you defensive at first and grew out of it or were you immediately willing to take ownership? So I would say my natural inclination was to get defensive. I believe that because of the trauma I experienced from my mother who used to do silent treatment, I would either get defensive or I would get reactionary. It took me years, actually, when I began doing group therapy, which started in 2014, I would say at least three or four times a year I did group therapy where we had to practice expressing our emotions and then taking ownership for our emotions little by little through this practice, I was able to begin to take ownership of my behavior. Now, I'm still very reactionary. It's funny, my son, there's a picture of Colin right there. It always happens. He's the one I can sometimes have the most contentious communication with and it's always the same. I blow up and then literally text him five minutes later or call him five minutes later saying, I'm sorry. And he goes, I'm used to it now, dad. So we've established this and I'm doing that. By the way, probably in the past, it took me an hour. Now I got it down to one or two minutes or sometimes I even catch myself. This is something you have to practice to take ownership of behavior that is unkind to another. Rachel, thank you for that. All right, Arine says, question, I've been in a six year non-emotional, non-emotional, available relationship. I want to walk away without hurting him, kind of want to ghost him. What do you think? I guess my question is, how would you feel if you were ghosted? I think this is where being an adult in a relationship, folks, oh, here's the book. Folks, the fact that you're even considering ghosting him tells me you're not a grown-up in a relationship. I would read how to be an adult in relationships. Folks, being a grown-up means saying the hard stuff. That's what being a grown-up is. If you want to be treated like a human being, or not a human being, if you want to be treated with respect then treat others with respect. Renee, I'm not a real fan of your thought process here. If this relationship is not what you see, then simply express your thoughts, how you feel about it and tell them that you're gonna take a break or walk away from the relationship, but do it in person if you've been together for six years. I can't tell you how many people are afraid to speak up and let me tell you the reward at the other end of speaking up, it's not about hurting him, you can't hurt him. He can, you can't hurt someone unless you punch them. Then you're hurting someone. If you're expressing your feelings and your boundary is what's okay and what's not okay, it's on him how he reacts to it, okay? That's my two cents on that one, so thank you for that. Let's see, SW, I don't see Kims. By the way, folks, if you have a question, write the word question and post the question thereafter. Brooke says, no question, I just wanna thank you for all your videos. They add to my much value. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Jones says, question. I think I found the right guy except his hygiene. That's not a question, folks, but okay, I'm gonna share the story of the first time Marie came to visit me, she said in a very polite way, she said, Jonathan, there's something I gotta bring up with you. And immediately I reacted because it reminds me of childhood. And she said, I don't think your deodorant is working too well. I'm like, I was so embarrassed. Now, what happened was I had worn a sweatshirt that I'd worn the day before and I went, it was a hoodie. I had a clean t-shirt on underneath, but the hoodie was stinky. And so I was embarrassed. I got a little defensive. I then got up, went to the bathroom, cleaned myself up and she goes, you're fine. And then since then, I bought a better type of deodorant since then. But she was very kind and said, I don't think your deodorant is working too well for you. Find a way to say it in a non-violent way and see how he reacts. How I reacted demonstrated my emotional maturity. And I think we appreciate that we can share with each other even those vulnerable things from a place of love and not from a place of judgment. Hey, I wanna thank Joan for the 99 cents super sticker. Thank you so much. Okay, let's go here. Let's keep swimming. Okay, Tati says, question. A month after I broke up with him, I re-initiated contact because I miss him. Wrong thing to do. Someone said to me the other day, should you go grocery shopping on a hungry stomach? I think if you miss him, you have to really ask yourself, what parts of the relationship did I appreciate and what parts of the relationship did I not appreciate with? Something caused you to break up with him. So the fact that you missed him might be because you're experiencing love attachment. If you're not familiar with love attachment, highly recommend reading the book attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, read this book so you can understand that you might be attached to the wrong person. So I would explore what were the reasons that caused me to leave this relationship and then ask yourself just because you miss them, is this relationship the right relationship for me? Folks, I'm gonna share something with you. Wait, how long did you date him? Compatibility is a key to relationship success. And many of you, this is why I talk about radical honesty, laying your cards on the table and the rules of engagement. You have to determine if two people are compatible with one another beyond the physical attraction. Do we share the same values? Are our lifestyles blendable? And more importantly, is this person emotionally mature enough to have the skills to be able to resolve conflicts in relationship and to be able to establish the deep roots of trust? This is why you have to really interrogate people. I say the word interrogate intentionally.  Again, if you need help with that, schedule a call with me. All right, Elizabeth writes question. Jonathan, should we wait for them to contact us or should we reach out to them? How would you do this without seeming needy? How do we get them to open up about their feelings?  It's a dance. He sent you a text message, you send him a text message, okay? Now, how do you get him up to open up emotionally? You start by opening up emotionally yourself. You lead by example. One of my dear friends, I love him dearly, but he's not the most emotionally communicative person or at least he wasn't until he was in a relationship with a woman who constantly expressed her emotions and because he liked her, he would listen to how she communicated and eventually he began opening up his emotions. Folks, lead by example, by expressing how you feel about your relationship. Again, if it's sincere and from the heart, you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. Express your emotions and see how he responds. That's how you get a guy to open up. And if he can, listen, if you don't need a man financially in your life, then the whole point of relationship is emotional intimacy. That's the real juicy delicious. When I say juicy, delicious, healthy, happy relationship, I'm talking about two people that can dive into the deep end of emotional intimacy. What is emotional intimacy? It's that capacity to be vulnerable with someone, to share. It's funny. My girlfriend and I, we sometimes, we recognize that we have thoughts that could trigger the other person into fear. Our thoughts of this relationship has some chat, but not that a relationship that as the, me, the individual in the relationship has some challenges and I'm not sure I want to impose my challenges on you, emotional challenges. And those thoughts can create fear in the other person. How do you release the fear by talking out your thoughts with the partner under the, listen, under the premise that we're still committed to one another, that we're just merely sharing thoughts. Folks, feelings aren't facts. Feelings are just, in the moment, are emotions like happiness, sadness, anguish, anxiety, depression, joy, bliss. Those are all different feelings and sometimes our thoughts in the moment might be a reflection of a feeling, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to abandon the relationship. So how do you build emotional intimacy? By sharing, by being vulnerable, by being authentic, by being transparent. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. All right, question from Monica. In those hundred days after meeting Marie, you spent 45 days together. Since there was distance, some of those days were on the phone or FaceTime. Okay, great question. So in roughly a hundred days, we spent about 45 days together. First was those two days that we saw each other in Chicago, then there was the four days she came to visit me two weeks after we first met. Then two weeks after that, she came and stayed with me for two weeks. And then two weeks after that, she came for three weeks and we included a vacation there. And then she went to Africa and then I went to visit her. Okay, by the way, I was spitballing the 45 days and 100 days. Okay, what did we do in between? We did telephone calls and we did FaceTime. We actually did WhatsApp, okay? Yeah, we did video chats, we talked on the phone, but at that point, we'd already called each other boyfriend and girlfriend. By the time she left during that visit here, we were all ready boyfriend and girlfriend and we agreed that if this relationship was going to work, that one of us, we need to be in the same city. So by the time she came the second visit here, we'd already established the discussion of living either together or living in the same city. And then by the next visit, it was already established we would move in together at some point, which we did a couple months after that. So yes, we did a lot of telephone calls and FaceTime. Honestly, now it's interesting, she's out of town in Chicago right now. I'll be candid with you. I feel so secure in this relationship. I don't feel the need to talk on the telephone all the time because we already have a deeply rooted relationship. I miss her being here and talking to her, but now that we're apart, I feel like, okay, she's with her family. I'm doing my things, hopefully connecting with my son today. I don't feel a need to talk to her. It doesn't mean I don't miss her. It doesn't mean I don't care, but I don't feel a desperate need because what happens is, this is what I think happens. When a relationship isn't secured, there's a need to have constant communication because you're afraid that God forbid, if you don't communicate one day, it's gonna all implode. That's what a lot of people experience. So the goal is to establish a secure relationship. How do you do that? Spending a lot of time together in a relatively short period of time. Within three months, it's spending as much time together to decide if this is something worth exploring for the long-term or is it gonna be a short-lived relationship? But dating today is like casual. Let me just see you when I want. I just wanna see you when I want. I just wanna see you when I want.  That's what's happening in a lot of experiences today. And I'm here to say, ladies, stop it. Don't accept that kind of behavior from men. All right, hope you get to just where I'm going. I don't blame Jonathan. Folks, I'm not proud of my past behavior. I have been inconsiderate. Makes me human. How do we learn? We learn, listen. I think when you've actually recognized that you might have caused someone some anguish or pain and you really recognize that, that's a sign of empathy. And I believe it takes, for some people, it takes longer to others to develop empathy.  And because of that, I became very needy when it came to love. It took me a long time to recognize that to genuinely care about another person's feelings. I think humans oftentimes date very self-serving, not intentionally, it just happens. And I'm not proud of my past behavior. Hopefully I've learned from those experiences in Grom. All right, Maria says question. Met him three weeks after the first date, he texted me sweet text and now didn't even open my text over a week, ghosted. I didn't text him back because he didn't even open my text. I would be careful of that, folks. Let me just say something. Sometimes on, at least I know what, well, you're probably an Apple, but I know with Android, something gets delivered, but it doesn't show red, but it was red. I went to my son, didn't you read my message? Yeah, but it didn't show red. Yeah, unfortunately, you've been ghosted, it happens. Thankfully it's been short-lived, it was only three weeks. All right, Kim writes question. What would cause, Kim writes question. What would cause a man in his early 60s to suddenly decide to want to go to church without ever mentioning it to you during your two-year relationship with him? That's a good question. Why would someone all of a sudden have a spiritual awakening? Something must have happened in his life or there's a reason for him to go to church. Now, you know what's funny?   But the other reason could be he wants some level of spiritual awakening and that's a good thing. So why not go to church together would be my invitation in that particular case, Kim. Go to church together. Hey, Leif, I want to give a shout out to one of our members in the group. She has a little symbol right next to her name. That little symbol means she's part of our group here on YouTube, thank you so much. So I'll give you a shout out. D says, please don't ghost. It's not high school mentality, it's junior high mentality. All right, let's keep going here. If you have a question, write the word question and then post the question there after. Here we go, Dorothy writes question. Firstly, is it okay to ask a guy I've been seeing for almost two years to get help for his fear of commitment? Secondly, is there any you can suggest for men he's very private person? Listen, if you two are in a relationship with one another, how about going to a therapist together? How about going to a therapist together? And just say, look, this is my boundary. If our relationship, listen, I appreciate our relationship together and yet it's not fulfilling my needs on an emotional level. If that's something you can't do, I can accept that and I'm willing to move on. But if you'd like to salvage this relationship, let's go to couples counseling together. Now, I'm not saying you say it just like that. I'm giving you kind of a clip note version of how you might say it. But ultimately, I would seek couples counseling to help him open up emotionally. Folks, unless you're dependent upon someone for your financial needs, then you have every right to explore the deeper emotional intimacy in a relationship. And you might take a break, say, look, I'd like to take a break from our relationship for a while. That might cause him to evaluate and appreciate the relationship. That might be another choice as well. So Dorothy, thank you so much for that question. Rachel writes, second question. I understand if you pass as I already asked one. I'm really struggling feeling my emotions. It terrifies me how to ask a therapist to go from CBT, DBT to process emotions. It's very understandable to be afraid of and have fear centered around our emotions. Most of us have difficulty regulating our emotions. I think finding a person you feel safe with, that's the most important thing, to find someone who you feel safe with to express your emotions.  And after a while, as they say, practice makes perfect. It takes time to learn to do this stuff. This isn't easy. Maybe take a two week retreats and go to a retreat center. Actually, I was just talking to my coach the other day. She actually recommended going to a 10 day silent retreat where you're somewhere where you're actually silent for 10 days. That's another option too, you find, and by the way, this stuff bubbles up our emotions like you can't believe going to a retreat center and being silent for 10 days and you're working in a community. I know it might be difficult for some people from a financial perspective, but those are a couple options I would recommend. So Rachel, I'm sending you a lot of love on that one. Everything you say resonates with me, Jonathan. I love listening to you because it just locks into my thoughts your truism. Well, thank you, Marilyn, I appreciate that. Jojica says, Rachel, it shouldn't terrify you to speaking your emotions, then he's not right for you. And if it comes from an insecure work on yourself first. That's true, folks, when it's sincere and from the heart, you really can't say the wrong thing to the right person. Even Marie and I, when we're sharing difficult things, we've established enough trust with one another that it doesn't put us in fear and we feel safe enough to keep digging in, digging in those nooks and crannies where fear does pop up and the best way to heal it is by getting it out. With someone you trust. Okay. Sheila says, you can never say ask a wrong question to the right guy, amen. Thank you so much. Let's see what else we have. Okay, film girl says, question. I grew up with silent treatment experience. I've had to separate myself from them to stop the pain. What will a man think about a woman without family and how do I explain? Great question. You know, reaching a state of neutrality emotionally means you're not triggered by it and you're not joyed by it, okay? You're just in a state of neutrality, okay? How do you explain? You just simply say, while I love my family dearly, I was in a toxic environment. I'm using the term toxic in the sense that my mother or father would give me the silent treatment, my siblings would give me the silent treatment and as a way to set a healthy boundary for myself, I don't actively communicate with our family. As much as I love them and I wish they were part of my life, it seems to me that we can't choose who we're family with. We can choose who we have friends with and we can choose who we love. And while I love my family, you know, from a appreciated, I love my family. I also recognize I love myself enough to know to remove myself from this environment because that's what's important for my emotional well-being. Film Girl, I hope that helps. Seek counseling on that as well, but to explain that to someone, if they're actually a kind, compassionate human being, they'll most likely understand, okay? Film Girl, thank you so much. By the way, leave says watching, but only 11 likes. Please close the chat box for a moment and come back to the show and support. Please give me some love by hitting that like button. All right, if you found value in this, please post a comment below. I'd like to hear your thoughts. If you did find value, please hit that like button. Please share this video. Please subscribe to my channel. Also, if you need some support in the links below, schedule a discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. Join my group called Midlife Love Mastery. Join the group here on YouTube. Follow me on Instagram. Check out the books I recommend and all the other links below. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone. Pat the teddy bear pillow and give Iter them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. I wanna thank Don and CeCe and Dorothy. Thank you for that nice comment and Didi and Leif is in the house and Sheila and Rachel and Renee and Film Girl and Honey, everyone, thank you, Johica. Thank you so much, wishing you a fab day. Be well, take care, bye now.


Welcome, everybody. This lunchtime session is so that Lan and I can help you get your stuff together in order to submit a talk to scale. We are very, very interested in new presenters. It's always been a big part of the conference. And we know that it can be hard to get started. So this is to help you along a little bit. I'm Josh Berkus. I'm on the Scale Program Committee. Specifically, I work on the Cloud Native Track and KCD Los Angeles and help out with the new data on Kubernetes Track. Hi, and I'm Lending. I'm a longtime volunteer with scale in various capacities, including on the AV team where we do the streaming of the talks, which we'll get about into later. And recently, I joined the program committee so that I could advocate for the talks that I want to see at scale. There's a link both in the chat and on top that you can just bring up the slides on your own screen. So we'll just have a short about 15 minutes with some general advice on how to develop a talk concept and write a proposal. And then we're going to go into Q&A, where we're available to answer your individual questions and also help people with advancing their talk concept or proposal or other things. When we get to the Q&A portion, each person who's speaking should let us know whether or not they're OK with being in the recording. It is actually helpful for other speakers who couldn't join us for the session to see us helping other speakers to get an idea of because people were presenting for the first time, didn't have a lot of the same problems. But mostly we're here. We're here to get all of you to submit proposals for the conference because we need new speakers. We want more proposals. There are new areas of technology that are open source, and we need proposals for people to work in those areas. And scale is actually one of the friendlier, easier conferences to submit a proposal to. So you're in a good place. Right. So if you're not familiar with scale, this is short for the Southern California Linux Expo. It's one of the largest volunteer run free and open source community conferences. So it's volunteers who are running it, who meet on our own time. And we shape the conference to what we want to see there. I've been a part of scale for a very long time. This is over 20 years. And I feel like I've been there for a good 15 years. So our audience is people of all skill levels, background, and interests. I feel a lot of the people who attend scale are attending it to see the same people year after year and to catch up with them. And so things that you can expect. We definitely have tech talks. We have workshops. We have things that people, other companies, wide them out to go and attend scale. But we also have community talks. We have how to use things, how to build an open source community. We have beginner Linux training. We have strong interests in cybersecurity. So there's a CTF. We have game night. So it's a community conference. And we are looking to learn from each other. Most of our talks are live streamed and recorded. This is something that volunteers developed over a long period of time. And so we've been doing this since scale 11x. And now we're on 23x. So we're getting a better hang of doing the whole live streaming to YouTube. And you'll actually find a number of our talks from past years on YouTube. The link to that is in the end of the slide deck.  You don't have to have the slides or the full outline or anything like that. But you should have a pretty clear idea of what you want to say. And then you're writing your proposal as a summary of what it is you want to share on stage. So we'll go through a very brief version of how to figure out what you want to present and how. One of the first and most important things about giving a talk is that you're giving a talk to someone. You're not just particularly, we're talking about a live conference here, right? So you're not just giving a talk for the video or whatever. You are giving a talk to a specific group of people. And you probably have in your mind, even if you haven't really thought it out, a group of people that you want to talk to. And figuring that out is kind of the first step in figuring out what your talk is going to be. Like, is this a talk for application developers? Is it a talk for system administrators? Is it a talk for open source project owners? Is it a talk for people who want to make their first contribution? And so give some thought to, who is it that you want to be in the audience? Who is it you want to talk to in the audience? Why are these people at scale? And what is it that they need to know or to do that you're going to address? So as I've mentioned before, we have all sorts of folks in the scale audience. You have the folks whose companies fly them out to attend the conference to learn more about technology and what's happening in the fields. You have people who are just starting out in their careers. You have people who are students who heard about this open source thing. You have people who think open source is a good idea. You have scientists who use all sorts of open source technologies in their work. And maybe they want to learn how to use R or Julia or Python better. And you have a lot of cybersecurity experts, people who are network engineers, all sorts of people who see scale as a place where they can learn a bunch of cool things. And one of the things we want to highlight is we welcome beginner talks. That's actually how you make certain areas of your open source or technology more approachable to people who are just starting out, don't know anything about it, but are eager to learn. I actually did a little survey on Mentimeter just looking at the abstracts and titles of the past few years of scale talks. And so you can kind of see the variety here of topics, technologies, and things. So if you thought that you had to give a super technical talk that's not really necessarily a case, what you have to do is think about the audience and scale and what would cause them to pick your talk over a number of other talks that are happening at exactly the same time. Yeah, so every thought of the audience, you have to think about what's my goal in being up on stage and giving a talk, right? Do you have an open source project that you want to promote and introduce people to? Are you trying to share a solution to a common problem? Are you trying to start a discussion around a common problem that doesn't have a solution?  Maybe you're even just sharing a status update on something that a lot of people use. And part of the thing about this goal should be thinking about what is the audience going to get out of that, right? You're thinking about what am I getting out of this and what is the audience getting out of this, right? Because in a good talk, everybody is getting something out of that. With that framework and having sort of thought about stuff, you're ready to sort of narrow in on what your topic or topics for your proposal, because you can make multiple proposals. And if you really, really want to speak at scale, I recommend actually making more than one proposal. You know, what it would be.  Unless you're a professional presenter, this topic should be something that means something to you personally or that involves you personally. So it could be a technology you're an expert in, but it could also be something you just learned. Like, the best time to write a beginner talk is right after you personally graduated to the intermediate level and something. Because that's right when you remember all of the things that were hard as a beginner. You know, maybe you overcame a problem and you think that your solution for the problem is going to be interesting for other people to replicate. Maybe there's a controversial topic that's in an area where you have expertise and you want to bring some kind of clarity to that. So how long is a talk? Normally our scale talks are given in one hour time slot and generally you spend about 35, 45 minutes on the presentation with 10 to 15 minutes Q&A. Again, sometimes they'll ask you questions during your talk and it's really based off of how you want to run your talk. But be prepared to go in depth, give examples, engage your audience and solicit the feedback from the audience. Don't just speak at them, hear from them. Like part of the beauty of being at an open source conference is what you learn from each other. So I've done a much longer speaker training, including at scale before. And one of the things that we go through in helping people refine their topics is exercise we call one sense. And the basic idea here is if you can't express your topic at a very high level in a single sentence, it's probably because you're not sure what it is yet. And refining that topic to one sentence helps you a lot in refining the topic for your proposal and your eventual talk. So three very common sort of sentence structures that you have for this topic summary are some topic is cool, easy, fun, hard, terrible, right? Or very common for technical talks, how to do something by using something else, right? Very common sort of summary topic. Or sometimes you're there to advocate for something and you wanna say contribute to or adopt or avoid or stamp out something. So here's a few examples that are actually summaries of talks that I've seen. One is rust is more secure. It's the more secure programming language, right? That is a talk topic right there. And then you can imagine everything that would go into that talk. Or a summary of pretty much all of the speaker trainings and stuff that I've done, how to present better by using good talk preparation. Or another one I've seen in other conference like contribute to Python as a non-coder, right? Opportunities to contribute in areas that are not writing Python or C code. So once you have come up with that sort of general topic, then what you wanna do is say, what is the story I can tell around this topic? Because what people enjoy seeing what will keep them in their seats during your presentation is a story. Not just a, you know, here's some code, but something about that code. Why is it important? How did you start using it? How long you've been using it for? There actually are sort of six canonical stories that people tell during sessions at technology conferences or hybrids of more than one of these. Some examples of, common examples of these end to end is pretty common. And that's actually what we're doing here, right? Where we are going through the process of developing your talk concept from beginning to end. You know, but you can get more creative. Show and tell is one that I like to see and I haven't seen nearly enough where you show off something cool and then you spend the rest of the talk explaining how it worked. And by structuring things as a story, it's more engaging for the program committee who is voting on your talk and it is more engaging for the audience who is watching your talk. But the important thing is that this story should be a story that means something to you. A good example that we had, Gwyn did a talk a couple of years ago, scale 17X, where she had a pull request for Kubernetes that took over a year to merge and she told the story of that PR, not merging for a year. And it was an excellent, really fun talk. So think about what stories you can tell including stories about your experiences. So let's talk about how you submit a proposal because it's actually pretty straightforward in scale. The most important thing about your proposal is the title and the abstract. We're looking at lots of proposals. It's a whole committee looking at various proposals and saying, wanna see this at scale. This seems like really cool and we advocate for it. We vote for it. We try to convince the other people on the committee, hey, we should really select this talk. So in order for us to be able to do that, we need to first of all, look at the title and abstract and understand what the talk is about. And some of it is also, it's a talk in the right category. We tend to select talks within our categories of expertise. And so unless the talk is in our category, we might not even see the talk. And so if you can be very clear, both from your title and abstract what the talk is about, who are you aiming for? Is it a beginner audience, is it an expert audience? Like who are the people who is your chosen audience? Why should they be coming to the talk? That all helps us figure out which track you belong in and put you in front of the committee members who are putting together that track and trying to line up a track that has a really good coverage and maybe like common themes and things like that. Something that you should probably expect, but most people are surprised by is, whatever you enter into the submission for proposals, that's literally what goes on our website. There's nobody that does data entry for you afterwards and puts things, literally everything you enter into the call for presentations ends up on our website and in the printed program. So your speaker bio, your speaker headshot, whatever the abstract is, we even asked you to maybe upload your presentation if you already have it or upload it at some other point. Once you sign up for an account on our website and you submit to the call for presentations, you can revise it at any time. I would say that if you keep revising it after the deadline, then we probably won't have seen the revisions, we will have seen whatever it was at the time that we were evaluating the talks and selecting them, but if we select your talk and you go onwards, I would highly advise to keep revising it so that this is what your audience is gonna see when they decide whether to attend your talk or not. Back to you, Josh. So I have here a little sample, a proposal that gives you an example of what should be in a good proposal. The, about bananas. This is actually something one of my coworkers came up with for another volunteer run open source conference called DevConf. So this is, and the thing is this has sort of all of the parts. Now, one is to point out that it's actually a sort of reasonable length, this is three short paragraphs which is enough to get the point of the talk across without making anybody stop reading it. You can bring in other people, you can talk about people's experiences, like I said, one of the things is to tell your story or your client's story or a co-worker's story, right? Because people wanna hear stories then we hear stories about people. So bring that in and make sure that the abstract and the title both get across the same message, right? So here it is, is it's things that you can do to improve your yield of banana crops. And then this is, hey, we're going to show you our experience with improving the yield of banana crops. There are some other sort of basics, like Land talked about, make sure that it's very clear up front, often in the first sentence, what the talk is generally about, both for the sake of the program committee and for the sake of the audience. Because when people are trying to categorize things in the head, when they're trying to decide what room to go to in the next five minutes, they don't necessarily read any further than the first two lines. The, spell out any acronyms or explain buzzwords. The, and then have an outcome. Say what you expect your audience to get out of the talk because then that lets people self-select and decide whether or not the talk is for them. So when you want to submit your proposal, it is on our website, the links are at the end of the slide deck. You would be on this call for presenters page and we very, we put the information that you need at the very top page. There is a CFP tool login. If you have presented a scale before, you probably still have an account. We set the password. If you haven't presented a scale before, then you would sign up for an account and then keep track of that account. Because as we said, after you submit the proposal, you can still come back and revise it and revise it and hone in on it. So I would highly encourage, if you think you can give a talk, just start. Put it into the system, revise it. If we happen to be looking, we might say that looks like a cool talk, but I probably want to contact them and find out a little bit more and see if we can get the abstract tightened up. Those are things that we have more of a luxury to do before the call for paper ends. The moment that the call for presenters call for papers ends, then we're all very busy trying to select talks for the conference itself. So get your proposals in early so that we have more of a chance to see it and really think about it instead of at the last minute. The other thing is that we have a section that says, send a message to the reviewers. If you really want our input, you really want to call something to our attention, please fill in that field and then we'll keep an eye out for any of the proposals that have a message to the reviewer and see if we need to respond to it in a timely manner. So one of the things you will notice is that there are a whole bunch of different tracks available for submitting your talk into. Do try to pick the right track that seems appropriate for your talk, but don't spend a lot of time stressing about it simply because among other things we do a fair amount of talk swapping between tracks because there is overlap in topic areas between a lot of the tracks. And so if something really belongs in a different track, the program committee will move it to that track. So just pick something that's appropriate, but don't worry that much that you pick the perfect track for it. And this is pretty much the end of the presentation. Here are the links, the link to this PowerPoint, the link to the call for presentations. If you want to look at past talks, we have a YouTube channel. I advise that you look in the playlist section for each scale conference. We try to have like one master playlist for it. Was that your presentation, Josh? That usually too? That's actually a GitHub, that's actually a GitHub project that has links to like a couple hundred different resources on public speaking and writing talk proposals and developing your talk concept and even maintaining your own personal speaker page. So it's a great, it is a resource of resources. Great. You wanna talk about that Slack? Yeah. So we don't actually have a general chat channel for scale speakers, but we have three related tracks, cloud native, KCD Los Angeles and date on Kubernetes. And we do have a Slack channel there on the cloud native computing foundation Slack if you wanna pop in there and ask questions and ask for feedback. Aside from that email is great. If you email CFP at SoCalLinuxExpo.org, we will see that message one way or another. Casey is very on top of that. And then the final slide is an invitation to you guys. What questions do you have? What can we help you with? What was posted was about submitting multiple proposals and different versions of the same topic versus entirely separate topics. And I would say yes to both actually. You can do different topics and you can also do different versions of the same topic as long as they're different. Like for example, if I was doing the introduction to Kubernetes, I could submit that both as a one hour session and as a workshop. I can say, hey, I've got this content. I could do either the short form or the long form and so I'm gonna submit both. The, or if you happen to work in AI and the cloud, you can submit one talk about your technology that's kind of a deep dive on the ML algorithms you use and a second one that's more about, oh, how do we deploy the scalably? And by doing those variations, you actually make it easier for us folks on the program committee because one of the things we're trying to do is create a balanced program. And so we're looking at what audiences are being addressed by the talk and which things are beginner oriented and which things are advanced, et cetera to create a balanced program. And so if you have the time and the expertise by giving us multiple options, you may get easier for us to fit your talking to the schedule. Probably also pointing out as workshops. So you can submit an idea for a workshop through the CFP process. You should call out explicitly in the description that you plan this as a workshop. Workshops are typically two to three hours and we'll have a different room set up. So not a presentation, but tables where people can work, a classroom set up and typically have more prerequisites what people need to come prepared with, stuff like that and we'll probably reach out to you individually if you propose that. But that is something you can propose. Yeah, and both to answer a question that we have in chat here from Christina, as well as that is. I mean, my first bit of advice is if you've never done a public presentation before, don't start with a workshop. The preparation, like not only is it two to three times as long, it probably requires 10 times as much preparation. The, and we do, and to answer the question is we do recommend having multiple people for a workshop because generally the workshop, you're gonna end up wanting at least two, right? In terms of like one person who's doing the slides or demos or whatever, and a second person who is helping the attendees with their individual problems. We've had crews of up to five people for doing an individual workshop because like the intro to Kubernetes workshop, generally had over a hundred students. And so we needed a lot of people out there helping individual students with their individual laptops. I don't know that we've ever set a limit on it before, right? If you have some reason why you need 20 facilitators in your workshop, then email us and we'll consider that in a case-by-case basis. It's not out of the question. You might have a very good reason for it. Thank you, that was helpful. No, I usually, I'm with AWS and we usually have about four or five facilitators, sometimes like six the most at the workshop depending on the workshop, that's why I was asking. Yeah. Multiple people at my company, we work on specific technology set, I work at LinBit, but we're going to, multiple people are going to be submitting talks and we're wondering because a pretty common one would be just how to use the technology set and configure it and combinations related to that. If we submitted the same talk, but multiple people at the company, would that hurt both of our chances or all of our chances of getting the talk selected or how would you recommend doing that if we all, we do all have individual ones that we want to submit as well, but as far as making sure that there's a widespread because it's multiple people that we'll be submitting. I mean, if it's a topic that we want, right, that we decide that we want for program balance and everything else, somebody is going to get selected. And then it's really up to your team to decide if you want to strategize on that by working together to submit the best possible presentation with the person who really wants to do the intro talk or whether you want to submit independently and have the program committee sorted out. The only thing I would say there is kind of a limitation is one of the things we do look at in terms of program balance is people's employers. As in, we don't want to have a case where, for example, you go to one of the days of DevOps LA and the first four hours are all people who work for the same employer, right? We're not going to do that. And so, you know, so effectively like say if the LinnBit team is submitting stuff, there's going to be a limit on how many talks by people from LinnBit that get accepted because we do check that. The, you know, and if you're looking for, you know, if you're looking to tailor this, it would help you to submit in different tracks, right? Because what we're concerned about is that the audience needs to have the experience of hearing from a diverse set of speakers. The, so, yeah, so, you know, just really decide. And the other thing to also decide is whether or not it makes sense to whether it makes sense for like two members of your team to team up rather than submitting, competing things. The, we won't actually do that as a rule. As a rule, we will not reach out to speakers saying, hey, did you want to combine this? It has happened, but it's not usually how we approach things. Casey? Yeah, I was going to add, if they're literally the same presentation, I would discourage you from having more than one person submit the same presentation because like I'm going to notice and it's kind of just irritating. Like it's not, it's not an awesome experience for reviewers and it's going to like split when people are going to be confused. On the other hand, the other thing to not do is like submit a talk that multiple people could give and then like change who's giving it at the last minute, right? Like yes, I understand multiple people can give it and you can put that in there and mention that, but try to know well in advance who's going to give the talk because we do keep track of that and we send you information and it goes in the program and if that's getting shuffled around, like we know last minute things happen, but we like don't just be like, eh, one of us will show up and do it, it's all the same, like, you know, please don't do that. Yeah, I mean, it's actually sort of policy that we're accepting a speaker and a talk, not just a talk. So when somebody has to change speakers, it's not guaranteed that the talk will still exist because sometimes honestly, our evaluation goes, eh, it's not a great proposal, but I've seen this person's other talks and they know how to make it really exciting, but then if that's not the person giving the talk, then we'll pull it. Mark's Center Program Committee for government, public information, what are the actual track names? Open government and we just changed it to the open AI and applied science track. But I do think this is a good time to talk, especially since we just had two questions from Linbid and AWS. One of the other things we keep an eye on for is what we would call a vendor talk, when it's just an ad. Like when basically like we've had talks in the past where everything in the proposal looks great and then what happens is that the talk itself is, and here's five minutes explanation, 10 minutes explanation of the problem and now here's 40 minutes about how our product solves your problem. And it's like, I mean, I get it, but at the same time it's like, is it an open source solution? Can I go and download it? Can I go run it? Do I need to be in your ecosystem to use the solution? And so on and so forth. If it's like, yeah, you gotta be using my product in order to solve this problem, well, it's not really in the scale ethos. So it's just something to keep in mind. Yeah. So like in the case of a lot of like, I know this because I work for a vendor, in the case of like, for this sort of thing is for a lot of us, we're for companies that have projects, right? And also have products and just keep the talk focused on the project. So Simon? Sure. I'm a bit hard of hearing in one ear. Now, how's the QI work? If it's in a huge room and people were asking questions or just shouting out without a mic, that could be a problem. Yeah. Well, in most of the rooms, we do actually have people use a mic because we want further recording. And if you have a hearing disability, please let us know about it and then we will do something about it. Like for example, in your particular case, we have volunteer proctors in each room. And so the easier solution for you is going to be have the proctor repeat the question to you from close up. That's excellent. Thank you. We're actually this year, we're actually specifically planning to potentially have some deaf presenters and are working on accommodations for that if we can make all the arrangements. OK, excellent. Also, I was talking about the laptop earlier. Is there any specifications like, I think it said HDMI port for the projector? Does it have to be a certain resolution or some projectors are a bit finicky? Yes. Oh, Leanne, that's you. I can't tell you off the top of my head, but when we send out the speaker information, we do indicate that information. And that is because it helps us with the live stream and the recording. Yeah, the other thing I'll say on that one is if you have your presentation ready ahead of time, then it's also possible to get a backup laptop to display things if something goes wrong, but only if we have it ahead of time. I do that for my tracks. If I don't have your can't do a backup for you. Right, OK. I'm also thinking about power as well and stuff like that, because I'm from the UK. So we're on. Yeah. Well, then again, laptops are switch mode, so it should be all right, I guess, but. Yeah, usually we do have a collection of video dongles available. There's a couple in their standard needs podium plus, like at the front, we have an extended set of video dongles. We do not have a collection of power adapters available. So you want to make sure that you've got the adapters. Yeah. Yeah, OK. Not every track in the past has dongles. I think we should talk. It would be great if we could do that for every room, but I can't guarantee that we'll actually have that forever room this year. So I don't want to promise that. Please bring dongles if you need them. And one more warning or one more note about vendors.  So if you are from a company and a vendor and you really want to do a vendory sales pitchy talk, you can absolutely sponsor a session or track on the sponsored tracks day and you can have a room to do whatever you want. But that doesn't go through the CFP. You can email me and we can talk sponsorship and we can make that happen for you. And that's CFP at SoCalLinuxExpo.org. Yeah. Alan. Hi. Yeah. So mine's kind of specific to what I want to talk about. I wanted to do something about kind of open telemetry would be the OSS project. But I I'm looking at should I be very generic? So so we made a big migration from a probably a partner. You know, somebody that was a paid version of observability and then we transitioned down to kind of an OSS model. And I guess my question is really kind of should I focus on that transition where we're going from a paid product to a free product? Obviously leaving out the vendor, but or should I focus on kind of a generic talk about doing observability? So I guess it's a very specific question or should I do two kind of focuses? Yeah, I mean, putting on my hat as as one of the the tractors for KCDLA in the best of all possible worlds, I would actually love to see you submit both. One is to submit the migration story, which I would say everything else being equal is the thing we'd be more likely to take because sort of end user stories very popular. We don't get nearly enough of them. The I but it wouldn't hurt you to put in a generic sort of introduction to open telemetry because that's also something that people ask for. The like I said, we do skew towards beginners in terms of the scale audience. So any talk that is beginner oriented tends to be fairly popular. And then sorry, the how does the like DevOps? I mean, obviously, this pitch could also work for DevOps LA, right? Like, yep, how does that work in terms of is that a different project? Like, so I'm not really they all go through, right? They all go through the same form and you pick a track. And is a track, a separate track. Yeah, yes. And and we swap, like, particularly between those two, between DevOps days and KCD LA, we end up swapping a bunch of talks because because again, we're trying for program balance. And there's an awful lot of overlap, right? Because like, say, you know, hey, how do I run a Kubernetes team? Well, that could go into either one and then, you know, and then we'll, you know, go with the DevOps folks and say, oh, well, you know, we don't have any talks on sort of management. Could we get this one from you? Like, were you keen on it or could we have that for KCD LA? And then they'll be like, oh, hey, we need more CICD talks. Did you get any submitted? So, you know, I would say pick the thing that you personally would kind of like to more be in the room for. But but understand that that we. We will swap between tracks. We'll check it with you. You'll get an email message saying, hey, we decided your talk was better for KCD LA. You know, email us back if that's a problem, or as we'll assume you're OK with it. Yeah, I have been thinking about doing a sort of talk being like something broke. How do you fix this? That's a common thing I hit. I do a lot of work with Spark. So my thought for a talk was like your spark cluster is not working properly anymore and it's slow. How do you figure out what's wrong? Is that a talk? I love that talk in the open A.I. track. 100 percent every spark project I've run has always been six months over budget. That exact issue. So I'm here for it. OK, I'm almost like so long as you can string five sentences together and tell a good story you're in. Oh, that was easy. OK. Isn't isn't the general solution you just not running enough sparks? The the the sometimes more often than it should be. I want that talk. Let me just. OK. Yeah, the other because I had two ideas. That was one of them. The other one was the I do a lot of work where I import data from external sources. And so your source data changed. How do you catch that? Or there's an error in your source data? How do you look to those errors out? So that was my other sort of talk. Yeah. And is the machine is machine learning stuff all in your A.I. track mark so far? I mean, if I actually get like I'll be honest with you guys, like in the past, if we get more than like eight to ten A.I. data track submissions, then that's a big year. OK, so it's a good way to submit in that, but but also know that that that particular topic might potentially get picked up by any of like four different tracks because we also have a Postgres kill track with a Maya skill track and we have a data on Kubernetes track, all of which that could be potentially relevant for that was why I was asking. Yeah, I do it. I do a lot of stuff with like Python and Great Expectations is a tool I use a lot for catching data changes. But there's yeah, so. We don't really have a data engineering track. And yeah, that's why I open beta. And so this is what we're what we're running up into here is I like both of those talks. I love Great Expectations, too. The like the other thing that you're running into is now do we have the same person giving two talks? Yeah. And trying to like we like if there are six tracks, if there's six talks in the open data track, for instance, then not having you you give one third of those talks. Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course not. Yeah. But but you have your better. I mean, in general, and this was actually also answered in chat because because Christina asked it was our ideal is that each speaker gives one talk, right? Because that way they can devote all of their energy and attention to making that talk the best. Sometimes, though, people submit such good proposals in an areas where we don't have a lot of proposals that we have people give like a couple of talks. And sometimes people end up giving more than that because we have a certain number of professional career speakers who come to scale. And we counted those people to fill in when speakers cancel unexpectedly, which is how I end up giving five talks one scale, something I hope to never repeat. This is not a recommended practice. The. So we do do a sort of deduplication stage in the sort of final acceptance. I and and sometimes this is between tracks where track leads will be like, how much do you want this talk? Because she also submitted one in my track and I want to accept that. And then and then we work it out. The but but I would say, again, do submit both because one of our goals is program balance and you don't know what else is going to get submitted. First of all, the reason I asked about the if one gets selected and yet that's the other one gets dropped is because I will be submitting with multiple people. And I know, for example, KubeCon, when you submit, you have two submissions. And if you do submit with different people, if one gets accepted, the other gets dropped, essentially. But anyhow, I did want to run. I have two ideas. One is a workshop. The other is a talk and they're for different tracks. So I just wanted to kind of see the if since we're on the ML AI topic, I will one one thing we were thinking is vending ML Ops platforms for data scientists and using like Argo, crossplane, like a bunch of open source like Jupiter, Hop, Ray, Nats Park, sorry. Is that something that and we were targeting the data on Kubernetes track for that? I that actually would be like in my head, that's also up the alley of the AI track as well. That it happens to be on Kubernetes. There's definitely some convergence there. I thought when you started talking about ML Ops from AWS, I thought you were going to go into SageMaker and Bedrock. So like I was going to say, if it's all SageMaker and Bedrock, I would suggest that go in a sponsored conversation because there's definitely things you guys could talk about there, but like everything you just talked about, I think this would probably end up being what Josh was just talking about, which is, well, I want this track and you want that talk in your track and like how do we balance it out? The issue here is we can, that's why I'm asking because I don't know which day is the AI track. The problem is that KubeCon EU is the following week and then we have to travel and it starts on Monday. And there's like when you travel that way, it's a problem. So it's a very good point. And so if you have a particular constraint about when you can talk, please let us know that in the submit. So like in the past, we've had Friday, Saturday, Sunday for talks and open data and open government. And so we may say like, okay, well, what about, would Saturday work for you, right? And if you're like, now I need it to be Thursday, it's like, well, that might be a better workshop talk, right? Cause the workshops that happen on Thursday and then like, you said you wanted to do a workshop talk. So maybe that's- No, no, this is a different workshop. I don't think we'll have enough time to build this in a workshop. We'll have an example, maybe a demo, but not a full blown workshop on this.  Yeah, okay, all right. And yeah, and then because this is like solely on Kubernetes, I mean, all the tooling that I just mentioned, like the, like we're going to be installing Ray on Kubernetes and everything else, like, you know, cross-lanes Kubernetes, that's why we're thinking data on Kubernetes. Anyhow, the second one for the workshop is actually building internal developer platforms on Kubernetes, again, based on completely open source tooling, like similar Argo, cross-plane, Kube cost, yes. Yeah, and I would say that you can just submit in KCDLA. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, I don't think the data on Kubernetes track has any plans for workshop time, although, you know, we might decide to label it that way. But submitted in KCDLA, which usually has four workshops associated with it. Okay, perfect. And last question is like, once I have the abstract, if I need some help before I submit, where do I reach out? Do it after you submit. After, so I first submit it then. Yeah, yeah, put a message in the reviewer, send us a note, because we will see that abstract and then we can like respond to it. Okay. And also put the slides, if you're on CNCF Slack, that you can absolutely ask about in the KCD Los Angeles gym. To refute the abstracts? To, yeah, or say, I mean, you would say I have an abstract in this, I wanted to get feedback on it. Yeah, because all of the organizers, the KCD track are in that channel. Okay, sounds good. Thank you. Before we get to KC, there was a question from Vincent Sloan who had to drop off. And it was specifically this question, if they want feedback on their abstracts, should they send it via email? You get the feedback and then submit, or should they submit and then kind of work on it? I am inclined to say submit, and then we will work on it because when you do that, those of us on the committee can all see the abstract and then we can have suggestions and then somebody can contact you and work with you, especially if we think it belongs in a particular track. Finish things off, KC. Sure, I was just gonna add one other thing about talk selections and replacements. So we do select speakers for slots within the tracks. We also select reserve speakers. And so if your talk is not selected, we may reach out to you around the same time that we reach out to accepted talks and say, would you like to be a reserve speaker? Some people are like, no, if I don't know if it's not guaranteed, then I'm not gonna write the presentation. But if you're willing to do that, this is also the way that sometimes we end up with the same speaker giving more than one talk. Maybe one of them was accepted and then they were a reserve for their other one and so it turned out that they were able to fill in because people do cancel and have things come up. Obviously, we wanna know as far in advance as possible if something like that happens. But yeah, so even if you are not fully accepted, you may be asked to be a reserve speaker if you are willing to do that. Yeah, and so I'd say is get working on it as soon as you can and don't miss the November 1st deadline.


My name is Faiz Bora. I am the Regional Chair of Surgery, Hackensack Meridian Health Network, Central Region, also Professor of Surgery at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. I look forward to chatting with you about lung cancer screening. Lung cancer screening is perhaps one of the most important screening tests that you can do for your health. If you screen for lung cancer, meaning you get a low dose CT scan once a year, you have a dramatically decreased risk of death or dying from lung cancer. So without that, one of the most important things that you can do to maintain your health. The current guidelines for recommending screening for lung cancer are all active smokers between the ages of 50 and 80 and past smokers who have quit within the last 15 years. If you meet criteria and if you are screened for lung cancer, there is a significantly decreased risk for you for dying from lung cancer. In fact, the risk is reduced by more than 25 and up to 30%, which in screening terms is a tremendous decrease in risk. Screening test really involves a very quick, perhaps a 5 second CAT scan. This is a low dose CAT scan and the amount of radiation received is probably just slightly more than a regular chest x-ray, so minimal exposure to radiation and with tremendous upside benefits for your health. It honestly probably takes less than 5 seconds. The CAT scan is done during one breath hold and by the time you breathe again, the CAT scan is done. If you have any doubts about your eligibility for lung cancer screening, then please take our 5 minute screening eligibility questionnaire.


To the girls side, Grand Rapids Greenway leaned a lot on new faces this season. The Lightning, only three seniors on the roster that didn't stop them from a 15, eight and one record. If you ask them, what's the biggest difference from last year to this season? Well, just look at their mascot. Probably our speed. We have a lot of young girls that are really fast, they're small, they can move their feet, and so that's really helpful. Our offensive play, our pressure, pressuring their defense when they have the puck turnovers, just a lot more scoring chances than last year. When you graduate nine kids, and most of those girls were part of the program for three, four years, it creates new dynamics. And the girls had some learning to do from each other. These aren't girls that, in many cases, played with each other coming up to the youth program because of the spread and age. So it was the new dynamics and the energy of that. One more game left on the schedule for playoffs. That's tomorrow night in Grand Rapids. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We're here today to talk about slavery and abolition. Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery. End of story. No, no, no. Abolition, slave emancipation, is not only a signal event in American history, but it is a signal event in world history and something that bears detailed study. Slave emancipation is the only case we have in historical times of the transformation of a social system. The end of one way of organizing society and the establishment of a new system. There were other transitions, sort of sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries. There was a transition from classical slavery to feudalism. Sometime between 1200 and 1789, there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism. These are amorphous periods. There's not a whole lot of documentation. It's hard to understand them. Slavery emancipation is completely different. Abolition happened in the time of the printing press. It happened almost in people's living memory. And it was a huge transformation. You cannot overstate how important slavery was. The Americans were settled by the Europeans as a place to put their slaves and to work their slaves. Slavery was the raison d'etre of European settlement. And it was a source of the greatest wealth the world had ever seen. By working slaves hard and transferring their product to their own selves, slave owners became the wealthiest people the world had ever seen. All the great fortunes in Britain, all of the significant fortunes in the United States, were rooted in slavery. And even those significant fortunes in the United States, mind you, rich people in Massachusetts were poor compared to rich people in South Carolina or Georgia. But even those, most of the major fortunes in the Northern United States, such as they were, were rooted in industries like cotton textiles or New York City mercantile activities that depended on the South. So overturning the slave system, something that happened between 1820 and 1865, that was huge. How did they do it? How did the abolitionists do this? This is important to understand American history. It's also important for those of you who are interested in overturning capitalism or transforming our system of ecological destruction to a system that's more sustainable. Making a major change is difficult. How did they do it? They made a huge change. There basically were two camps of abolitionists. There were the moral campaignists, starting with William Lloyd Garrison and continuing with people coming out of the evangelical Christian communities of the Second Great Awakening, which swept across the North in the early 19th century. Garrison was, you cannot but admire the man.  But he had passion for equality. He, as much as any abolitionists, carried through the whole idea all the way. All men are created equal. That includes the African. That means that we need full civil rights for the African, not just emancipation. And he would not shut up, as he wrote in the beginning of the first issue of the Liberator, his newspaper, 1831, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am an earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard. Is that great language? And given the context, it's a Shakespearean. Now, conservatives from Ulrich B. Phillips and all have attacked the abolitionists once you set yourself up as morally superior, making a moral campaign against slavery.  And you say, you're not so great. But the moral campaign was central to abolition. But it was only one leg of the campaign. Consider. Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution of the United States. He attacked it as a compact with the devil.  This is not a man who is involved in political compromise. The same values that led Garrison and some people around him to stand up against mobs, at one point, Garrison had a noose put around his neck. And he was dragged through the streets of Boston. He was rescued. But they were going to lynch him. Did he stop? No. He kept going. He would not equivocate. He would not retreat. That kind of moral stance makes it very hard to do politics. Could you imagine Lincoln like that? No way. Lincoln would work with anybody. One of Lincoln's best friends in Congress was Alexander Stevens, who went on to become the Confederate vice president. Lincoln opposed slavery from his earliest days. He thought slavery was wrong. At the same time that he was friends with Stevens, he cast, he said, over 40 votes in favor of the Wilmot proviso to keep slavery out of the territories conquered from Mexico. A war that Lincoln opposed. Well, Stevens supported. There's no question about Lincoln's values. But he would work with people. And that's the second track towards abolition. The political track. The people who would compromise, work with others, build coalitions, and elect people to office. Abolition needed both tracks. It needed the moral campaigners like Garrison to keep the politicians honest. And it needed the politicians to actually do something. Because Garrison, with his burning the Constitution and his refusal to participate in a government that was a compact with the devil, Garrison could never accomplish abolition. He didn't have a program for it. His program persuaded people to free the slaves. Oh, give me a break. If we're up to Garrison and the moral absolutists around him, we'd solve slavery. We'd have slavery in Massachusetts, as well as South Carolina. These guys were never going to accomplish slavery. If it was left to Lincoln and his political compromises, then we may still have slavery. Lincoln would have kept slavery out of the territories, wouldn't have touched slavery where it was because it was protected by the Constitution, and would have waited. And we'd still be waiting. You needed both. When Lincoln came to office, he was not going to touch slavery where it existed, except in the District of Columbia. He was very clear about that. And he told the Southerners, you don't need to worry about me. I'm not going to touch slavery where it is. I'm just going to keep it out of the territories and abolish it in the District of Columbia, which is no big deal. The Southerners, though, looked past Lincoln to the Garrisons, and they saw where it was going. They saw where Lincoln was going to be going, because Lincoln was walking hand in hand with the Absolutus. It's that coalition of moral certitude and political effectiveness that would eventually bring down slavery because it provoked the other side. Here we have the irony. If the South hadn't overreacted, then maybe we'd still have slavery. If they hadn't seceded, we never would have had contraband. We never would have had the Emancipation Proclamation, and we never would have had the 13th Amendment. The North was never going to go to war to end slavery in the South unless the South struck first. So that's abolition. What are the lessons for today? Not sure, but we can all look at, study, and come to our own conclusions. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.