Check it, check it, check it, it's a unique hustle, it's your boy, E.C.O. And I'm here with the lovely official, Ms. Jamaica. What's going on? Hey, man, another great day, man.  You ready? We powered up for the day. We got a lot going on the day, man. You better have that game face on the day, man. We just getting started, man. Check it, man. We got a special guest in the house today, y'all.  I listened to this guy's music, man. He woke me up, man. There's a lot of people out there talking, but they ain't talking about nothing, man. This brother right here, man. I had a few like that this weekend. It's a couple. I wouldn't even compare them because I don't play no games, man. LD 300 is in the building, man. What's going on, man? Man, it's all good, man. Appreciate you. Check it, man. I just really want to say, man, thank you for coming on the show, man. Say, man, you are... You're doing your thing, man. And it's needed. A blessing. It's needed. Yeah. How people need it. That's what they're telling me. No, no, no. Real talk. That's what I'm telling you. See, I got my opinion. I can give it to you. You know what I'm saying? And I really, really like what you're doing. And when Trio talk really called me about it, and I was like, okay. But then I started to key in on the things that were being said. Not only by what me and you talk, but just by the music, man. Yeah. And it's needed, bro. We need something that's going to tell us a story on how we can come out of our situations, bro. Oh, yeah, man. Man, it's been a long journey, but I'm thankful for T even had the opportunity to be able to do it. Man, just going back a little bit. Tell us a little bit where you're from. Yeah. And just for the people who might not know, give us a spiel on how you came in and all this. Just give us a back. And how long ago you started doing it. Give us a back story. We need all our help. We're going all the way back, man. We're going to mess with it. Okay, we're going to really get into it. Yeah. I want the people to know, because somebody can grow and learn from this, man. It can help people. That's what this is about. To know how you started, where you started from, and all of that. Man, Addy 300. I'm from Longview, Texas. Born there, moved around a lot. Ended up in Long Beach, California. You came back, you know. How did you end up in Long Beach, California? I went to stay with my uncle a little bit out there, getting in trouble down here, you know. What age? That was 16. Okay. But half done, it has a lot of trouble too. Yeah, but structure, the home structure, I was able to go out there and take a good look at that. So did you have your mom and dad in your life here? Well, my mom and my aunt and my grandma. So a lot of females. A lot of females. A lot of females. Structure. No, not it. So I went out there to be with my uncle for a little while. That proves the fact that you always need a man to raise a son. Of son, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. But I wasn't the only one in that situation as far as out of my homies. So we, through our life, my best friend Sae, a lot of people that was around, my little brother, we all helped each other because we all pretty much had that same situation of not really having no father. But for me, I wasn't the best child or whatever. I was seeking the streets at an early age. How old were you at that time? I've been active since 92 or since I was 12. 12? Right. Did you have siblings, like other brothers? I have one. My first cousin, he's, because we was in the house together, you know, I call him my brother. So he's the only, but other than that, he don't have no, I don't have any brothers or sisters. Did he go to California with you? No, he stayed, but he could have went, but he stayed. So, you know, it's funny because all of that happened. I was really heavily influenced by wanting to be in the streets, wanting to sell drugs, wanting to just be active, just wanting to be out there, you know, and did it, you know, not like I say, 12 years old jumped out the porch, you know, 12 to 16 active doing everything to come with it, acting wild, crazy, you know. Even in California? Cali was where I learned, like, how you can really take it up a notch, you know, so as far as like, you know. They're moving fast out there, like when I was your age. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, slow down. So I mean, for me, when I was living out there, because I was the same age, that's what's so crazy, but I'm just sitting there listening to you. And for me to come from the sticks, I came from the sticks, and I moved to Vegas. And to see all those lights, and to see all the stuff that was going on, and then to be introduced to the Bloods. There was Bloods there too, cars getting burned up, gang banging happening. It was something different for me at that time. That kind of took me from something that I had never, ever even thought about being anything. Then bam, you know, I hadn't even watched, you know, back then it was, it was before colors and all that. I'm older. So it was like, dang, these niggas, I don't really know what, I was trying to register it all. Then I jumped, you know, into it with them, and fighting every day and banging with them. And yeah, yeah, I got right with it. Vegas is different in the way that it had game. Yeah, yeah. Kids didn't have a game.  In Long Beach, they didn't have a game. They didn't, they wasn't making money. They was really caught up in what they was doing.  You know, all of it, like having, like how are we going to get some money? Then I was really into females, like just the whole, I was just caught. No, this, yeah. Yeah, me too. But all the way, all the way right throughout, you know what I'm saying? So I get back at 16.  18. I caught a aggravated robbery. And I'm skipping some just getting to kind of aggravated robbery. I got 10, 10 aggravated years, which just means you got to do half your time. Right. Did that change to 85% later on? It's just, it just works out that way. That you end up doing about 85%. Yeah.  You know what I mean? So I did the seven. Yeah. That time I get out. Two or three, almost three years. And that's when I get, I had caught for a lot of difference. She aggravated a South Coke drug. Task Force hit my high, all of this type of stuff. February 5th, 2007. So I ended up getting a stack sentence of 20 years, 10 years and 10 years. So 40 years combined is what I had. You got to do them. Consecrated. No. Consecrated. Consecrated. Meaning do one, finish one, make parole on one, then do another. Wow. And then when you get through with that. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it was bad, but to be honest, I never really accepted it as like, it just never really hit me as nothing too terrible. I always been one of them dudes that would ever come in it because I'm in it. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever would ever come in it, it come in it and you know, it's the same as when you riding around and everything looking good.  So what's your mom by your side during all of this?  You know, she had, I think she for sure loved me.  So I don't think she really knew how to just really be a parent. My father definitely didn't. You met your dad? Yeah, I was with my dad. Both of my parents sold. We got a chance to get on good terms before he passed. Okay, that's what I was wondering because I know the early part he wasn't in your life. Oh yeah, man. You can't hold on to that. Come on now. You can't hold on to that. You tell me sorry. That's good. Because there's so many people out there who would hold on to things. And then they wonder why their life is a mess. Exactly. They play tug of war with it, man.  They just, you know. Well, they only know what they learned. Right, yeah. And in the case of my mom, she had it rough. Her mom died when she was seven. There you go. So, you know, all of her brothers and sisters moved in to the house with their aunt. Come on now. And they, they had already had, you know, kids. So it, you know, it's going to be some favorites. You know, it's a lot of different things. Well, it becomes dysfunctional at that point for her. But my gramp, but my great aunt, Gypsy, Russell So just passed last year, she did as best she could with her sister.  And nobody's perfect. Everybody got to do the best they can. I believe that they did the best they could. Yeah, man. You don't got me. What's this therapy? I don't know. I love them too. I mean, I believe that's what I show great. Grandma, ain't nobody asked me about that. We bring it totally different. That's why it's like it is. We do. It's really like it's therapeutic. Somebody hear that they understand that they went through some, because your story is so similar to mine. Yeah. And I'm saying that because my mama mother died early on and I never met up my grandmother. And my, my, my, my grandma, her, her daughter, her mother helped us out a lot.  They come in that brown envelope. And man, and I used to be waiting on her to get back with them little old, you know, all the little treats, man.   All that, man. All that did give you a little bag. Boy, that got safe for eight days. I know that's right. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, you don't play there. I go there. I got to say that my grandma, my, my dad's, my dad's mom, Goldie, she, my hustle came from her and my uncles and my, my relative pool. But my grandma had her own cafe. So I really got my business side from her. Yeah. You know, another thing that when you're talking about, you know, this being therapy is not only to help people who or have people recognize something that they've already been through and watching them that, oh, somebody else went through it. But there are people who are going through situations and think that I'm going through it by myself because when you're going through something, you're not thinking anybody else is going through the same thing you're going through. All you can focus on is your situation. And I always tell people, I said, no matter how much you think that you only have one option, because when you're going through a hard time, you think that I have no other option, but whether it be on the streets or whether to go prostitute or whether to go do something else. And I've heard that so many times. But after years and you look back on your situation, you realize I had other outlets. But at that moment, I had such tunnel vision but then hearing people on this platform, because people are stuck to YouTube all the time. Yeah. All I ever wanted to be was a G. Like, I wanted to be a G, so. Oh, so you were? Yeah. So I chose it. Like, you know, I realized, I probably could have did my uncles, my relative pool, my grand, like, I was, that's what I wanted to do. And that's what I did. And I didn't compromise my morals and principles in it. So, you know, no regrets.  That's what I used to say. I was, that's how, you know, we was only like that. When you think, when you feel like that, you know, like I was into the money, like I'm getting this money. Yeah. My mom would say, don't, you're going to have to, you're going to have to get out of here. You know, what I'm going to have to do. And I left. I'm never going to stop. You know what I'm saying? I'm never stopping.  Yeah. I mean, in my mind, I felt like I was comfortable with that. Right.  That was just the way I felt about it. And I don't know where it come from, but it was something about the way the people was applauding me. It was like it was. Yeah. It was like they made me feel like I was the president of the United States. I've never been there, but the way they was like, yeah, every city, every city, every time they see me, I had a, oh, that's him. You know, and then when I got in my situation, it was even applied down there. So it was, I can't, oh, he here? Right. Yeah. It's like a movie, bro. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. Then my, you know, partner that even that was, that's the man of devil. Yeah. And I remember that, that even had been in the streets with me, he was there. Yeah.   It messed me up. I'm like, you know, this is my first day. I'm like, okay. So he said, we're going to eat when we, we end up getting that little line and going in and, and we getting ready to eat. And he started talking to me. He said, man, I got 12 ag man.  He chopped people up, you know? Right. And I was like, okay, he's like, man, that thing about this, you first get there. He said, when you get home and make sure you look out for my, you know, my kids and my own lady. Right. And I'm still trying to get, you know, I'm lighter than him. Yeah. But he said, this the first day, like Eve, when you get back, make sure you look out for him. I just got here. Yeah. So that's the way it be. Because you can't be on it. They be thinking about it. Yeah. And it'd be that real. Yeah. So what did your mindset change from being in the streets to being a family man? It took a long time. It took a long time. It took a long time. It took a long time. And what changed it? Reading. Information. Learning that my thoughts was creating my reality was like a big thing for me. I did not know that. I had no, and then as like, the books that we was, that I was reading at the time, like Think and Grow Rich, you know, just the Prosperity Bible or anything about Ernest Holmes and stuff like that. And just realized, because I thought about it and I was kind of seeing that it really was, every situation I had ever been in, I realized that I was like cooking that mood up way prior to it. And so I just started to consciously like, okay, I'm going to just, I'm going to do my best to think about what I want to happen and how I want to live and what I want my life to be. And then of course prayer and the religion of al-Islam and just being Muslim for real and as best as I could. And that's so crazy you say that because we always say that before you speak something, you think it first and it starts in your mind. So when you're talking about your thought process, that's what comes to mind. Thought process was the big deal. And then realizing what type of stuff leads to blessings and success and what doesn't, you know. But I wouldn't discount anything that I went through before. That's what I was going to say. Because that's what, that's my canvas now. That's what I use. That's what I use. That's what I prepared because my question was going to be if you had those books when you were younger, would you have changed at a younger age or you had to still go through? I wasn't going to read out here. Okay, because I wasn't going to read. It was about the environment and it was about seeing my uncle and my uncle Larry, my uncle Alfred, seeing them looking like that and seeing my cousin, Poo, seeing him develop like that. And then it was our generation of kids, like the one our friends, like my neighborhood, like us figuring out the game and then excelling in it at a young age, having money, people is telling you stuff what you should be doing but then they don't got no money. And it's like, I'm trying to attain something. Here recently, I just got my son a car for graduating, right? It was his son's name. Dillon. Dillon with the A-Rollin, I tell you. Right, right. That's what it might be. They ain't going to look back. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, well, I gave him this ultimatum and this is like the, in my mind this, you know, my wife probably, she got to probably get tired of me saying this, but this is the big deal for me. I told him that if, you know, I give you this car if you get your CDL. Okay. Not because I want you to be the best truck driver in the world but just because if you don't have a passion at this time, this is something quick that you can do and attain. And if you want to, I know you'll have a hustle that can sustain you, right? Mm-hmm. And he didn't put up no resistance. He just said, yeah, right? You ain't got that. Well, he's, he's, he literally just graduated a week ago or something. Right, and he already got a job as well, too. But here's the thing about it, though. I wouldn't have took that deal. At that age. None of us, and I talked to all of my partners about it. I don't think I asked you about that yet, but none of us would have took that deal. Mm-hmm. That's why I feel like he's smarter than, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. I wouldn't have took that deal.  He's smart. Like, he's, I asked him and he was like, um, uh, I said, so you gonna do that? You gonna do that? He like, yeah. I said, so you ain't got no, nothing, you don't got nothing, no fight for that? You just do it. He said, I think it's fair. Wow. That's good.  No, I mean, and a lot of times just being around people that's really thinking on a different level, that's enough.  You know, like, my daughter, what she say about why she was going to college or something? Oh, she says she, the only reason she's going to college is for networking. Yeah, they think different, bro. That's the key. Yeah, just for networking. She, you know, that's the key, but let me tell you, when her and one of her best friends sat down and I heard the discussion, thank God I was there because you have to overhear your kids a lot of times to really know where their mindset is. Yeah. And they started looking up colleges. They're looking up how much the parents make who are sending those kids to college because they look at that so they know the type of people who are going to the college. Right. So they know the type of networking they need. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's not just the college itself and what classes. You know, it's who will be attending. Influential people who are attending. Are they in the field that I need some connects with? That's smart. You know what I mean? Early. So they're researching all of that and I'm like... Yeah. Yeah, just the in-depth research is something else. You know, I love my kids. Yeah. So, let's get to the music, man. Yeah. You know, like I said, the sound is great, man. Yeah. I mean, I tell people, I'm sending it to people. Mm-hmm. I'm taking your YouTube and forward it or telling my brother and the song, Prayers for Increase. Oh, okay. Yeah. That song right there. Is that one of the latest ones? Yeah. Yesterday, actually, I'm just coming from Houston last night. We just shot a video on Houston last night. Got home at three. Well, we got up, we hit it right here. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, yeah, the last ones. Say, man, it ain't jamming, man. Yeah, man. I ain't gonna lie, Mr. Lee, man. What inspired that? Um, it's just, as with everything, as far as my music goes, it's just to like to basically put people in the mind frame of what it is, what it takes to be in this position to actually, you know, to make a living in music, to be, to have them being gone like that. You know what I mean? Like, just everything. Like, for me, it's just pulling back the veil and showing that, like, Kiki just told me the other day. Like, if, whatever, when you want this to even pray for this, to be in this game and to be moving in this game, you gotta take everything to come with it. Okay. And it carries a lot of stuff with it that you gotta be mentally prepared to be able to persevere through, you know, a lot of people, they really, you know, I'm not gonna say, but it's just that this guy right here, he just really exposes like who your real friend is. There's a hook on there. It sounds like a singing. Who is that? I don't know that. Listen, man. It's a sample there. I gotta say this. As, as Lee, I'll ask him, but the best, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The sounds, I mean, the mixing master and all that stuff is incredible. Thank you. How old were you? Um, 19. 19. Um, I mean, probably when you locked up there. Yes. Thank you. Like, you started in press. I started being serious. Yes. With, um, yeah, yeah, I had a first of all, I ended up going to this unit. I first of all, I always thought I was the best rapper even when I didn't have nothing. So remember that. No. No, no, no, no. I just checked some of that here lately. I thought I was the best. Everybody told you the best. Everybody told you the best. No, I just had the attitude. Right. But, um, being in there, it was a lot of people on that unit where I was at right then. There was so very talented and the, the most, you know, people got time. They got time to really get good at it.  Like, I really put the time in over there and the person who was the best there who really helped me and be with me every, the only reason he ain't here right now because he was with Houston with me last night and, uh, he's in Galveston today, but other than that, he from Dallas, so he would be here, you know, talking to me, talking to J-Daw, you know what I mean? I was going to ask you about J-Daw. Did J-Daw come on the way when the rivalry ended up in. It's a story, online, that like illustrates like the power or rivalry and pressure. The, that's the, yeah, he's from out here. He's from Oakrie. Okay. He had a 18-year center. Now yeah, I forgot how much time he had but he did like a long time. So he worked with y'all in there? Um, we wrote songs together when I was- Okay, that's a chemistry. It helped me to learn what I could do in a song that would make me stand out, like bar structure and deviating a pattern in rhyme.  If there's one line in that, that deviates totally from that pattern that everybody's gonna remember that line, that was like lessons and stuff that I was learning. Melodies. Did you learn how to be on the computer? No, I learned it by dealing with him. You see how different I'm dealing with him. And then just, you know, as I went on with it. That's a lot of information. Man, that was like that first week. But they got a lot of time. So yeah, they can definitely talk about it. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? So we just kept going, but then you still have to draw from a place. So moving from where I was at and another thing is classifications. I just, you gotta talk about, you know, as far as TDC goes, being incarcerated in Texas, classifications.  I'm always in prison around people like that. They gonna classify you with people like that. Yeah, aggravated people, aggravated youngsters. So I grew up with the worst of the worst in the state of Texas, so to speak. These are my friends. Gladiator units. I am the person that's at the gladiator units at all times. So this is what I'm trying to say. Everybody that I'm around to this day is like, you know, I got D-Women. Everywhere I go in the state of Texas, I got people around me that that's where our bond was solidified at. Yeah. Sometimes I say it and I be trying to pick my words or whatever, but it's just a different type of brotherhood. It's a different type of everything when you was locked up with somebody and they know you about whatever and you know they about what, like that thing right there. So, you know, basically what the devil meant for bad, it ended up being good and that's my, But the thing also, when you're going through that a lot of times, I've always been amazed at people when they say, man, you changed, but then nigga, I got older. Yeah. Hell, I'm old. I ain't, you know what I'm saying? When I left, when I left, I was this age, I come back, here we go six years later or five or four, three, whatever you, and I had this time to study, I used it wisely. So I'm going to be different. Anyway, you look at it. Right, but we, some people made me worse and then I got better. It's up to you. I always tell people that the change happens right there. Yeah. It don't, if somebody's like, oh yeah, man he, you know, I'ma change, I'ma stop this when I do this and that. When you get out, yeah. I told them kids at the juvenile detention center, you gotta stop now, you gotta change where you at. Yeah. Respect people where you at, whoever around, you know. Because I thought I was very aggressive until I met him. Yeah. I had to take the aggression of, you know. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He was worse. Really? And me, you know, where I'm from, I was aggressive. He was on six notches higher. Do it seem like. Like I had to go up.  Yeah. Like it's like, you meet your match in this place where you're in college. I met a lot of my match. You see what I'm saying? Like it's like, okay, that ain't, okay.  No, we not quiet. That's what I'm saying.  But it's a certain energy. You don't even have to talk to a person where you know already y'all not vibing correctly. You know, all this stuff be going on cause you sitting in these, you know, different situations. It's like, it's a different world. I always say it's not the same as out. No, it's not. It's it's own world. I think. It's definitely it's own world. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All the stories about what happened.  They prefer inside more than they do outside. I met a cab when people going to the walls unit.  He was telling me a story now. This is why we, we locked up and I'm like, you got out. He was like, yeah. I said, man, well, how long was you out? He said, I don't even want to tell you my name. Damn. I said, did you, he said, man, they called me in Huntsville, man. I never made it home. Damn. Yeah. They say he tried to do some with the little cash they gave him and ended up right back. Wow. Never made it home. Now that's the new one. I don't, I don't see in the week. I don't see in the 30 days. No, no, no. I ain't seen it. Never made it home. As soon as you got the bread, you went into the cabin. Never made it home. He didn't even make it to the halfway house. Never made it home. Listen, man, I was laughing so hard cause I'm throwin', you know what I'm thinking.  I'm already, you know, just the way things be. I want to get back to the music, man. First day out. What's that all about? Yeah, man. First day out. Actually my best friend, Saeed, told me when I was in there that I needed to write a first day out song. Yeah. And, Dope. Yeah. Like, he don't give me no if, like when he say something. It's hot.  So, you know, you need a first day out. First day out. He tell him like giving me artistic direct, like, but everybody do a first day out song. You know, I think you should do it. Yeah, yeah. Like that, you know. By being him and like, you know what I'm sayin'? I'm gonna go ahead and do it and it ended up being like one of the ones for me. Right, you know. But of course that track right there was done by my producer, Kane. I was gonna ask you about how you and Mr. Lee linked up. Oh, that's great. I've been out, it's important to know, after doing 12 years the first time, so you gotta think I've been locked up half my life really. Of course. I was only out for three years, or close to three years. So, I get out on March 25th, 2019, and within one month I put out my first album within 90 days I put out my first album. By the time it was, and you know, I gotta learn this business. Like, try it, because I need to make money out of this.  See, that's what I was wondering. Bro, I couldn't figure it out. It was like, damn. They were confusing you. Yeah, because they telling me basically to put the music out for free is what they telling me. So, I'm saying like, damn, but the music is costing me this. Yeah. To make. Yeah, that don't make sense, cause you saw in the sheet and it don't seem to me like it's supposed to come back. It wasn't no business in what they was doing. So, but I was still selling CDs, flash drives, or whatever, you know what I'm saying? And on my second album, since I got home when Crowns II, the second Crowns. When did that come out? I don't know when it came out. You gotta. It didn't make some music. 27th, this is my 27th month out. Okay. Right now, right? Friday, next Friday will be my 11th album since I've been home. So, it's 11 albums in 27 months. I done forgot when Crowns II came out. So, when you were doing music inside compared to when you came out and started doing your music, how different was that compared to, you know, for you to adjust? In there, it's, well, it's not much of it. It's still, it's an adjustment, but in there, my goal was to be the best. So, it was battling. It was, you know, going. Thaline services down there was an opportunity for people to basically. Network? For short, network. The whole prison is network. Whole prison is network, but a chance to display your talents in front of the. A massive crowd. Right, from everywhere. You see what I'm saying? Shout out to Smooty. Smooty went to college and he's got all of his college friends that he then gave his music to and they know about him and it spreads the word. Well, me, by being in prison like that and being like on this type of time, the same type of time I'm on right now, that's why, that's my network. So, people that's out, if they was, you know, if they was locked up or they didn't heard about me from being locked up, like I know who that is. I was in there perfecting my craft for years, like years. And I was receiving new information just for years. So. So when you came out? So when I came out, the only thing that I really needed to understand was the business cause I know can't nobody beat me rapping. I know that. You know, I know, I know that I'm the best rapper. And to the audience. No, wait a minute. Now that's why I get involved there. Do you think you the best? I know I'm the best rapper in, I know I'm the best rapper. In the world. In the world, I'm the best rapper in the United States for sure. In the United States. That I know of, yeah. I'm told him that. Oh, okay.  Drake, all of that. No, no, Drake, I don't know. Cause he, this got lyrical. Now Drake is the smartest businessman slash, know how to get on people records and make a hit. That's what Drake do. I'm talking about lyrically, you gon' get on this record with Kendrick. That's who they try to say it can flip and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You feel like you can, you can deal with that. Nobody can beat me rapping. I've been tried and tipped. Like I, nobody can. Rapping is the thing I do the very best in life. It's the best skill that I have. It's the one that I've put the most out. He told me you could be you on that level. If you get in that room, it's a problem. This is something. We already know. And that's why Mr. Lee, that's why Mr. Lee reached out to me. Mr. Lee, shout out Lee, Lee Roy, Gunther Abner. You know, he, he come, he come reach out to you. He found you. The best producer in the game or in the top three in hip hop history. Yeah. Yeah, he reached out to me. Yes. After you being out, did he actually come get you? Me and Lee been messing around now for over a year. And we got, me and him got 10 albums together. Where we got this out? We double digits albums of just me and him. I got, he got two. I'ma turn in another one next week. We work at a feverish pace. How do y'all process it so fast? He's the best, I'm the best. We love what we do. We love music. Y'all just go. I love music. You have a, what, the process. You had a studio in Austin? Yes, I record in the studio in Austin, but I don't like the confines of writing in the studio. I like to be able, give me all of the, I got a phone fully, like the best, the best, the best. I got a phone full of the best, man. And you know, I write to it as things occur, whatever my vibe is, when it get to 14, 15, I'm always in an album mode. So it's this feel, this feel, this feel, this feel, this feel. Once that album arc is complete, I record it all in one day. I go to the studio four hours, three, three, four hours at the most, record the whole album, send it to him. He makes a master, send it back to me. I send that for the USB drives. I sell them. That's very important. I'm gonna stop you right there because I wanted to, I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Me and you talked offline on the phone and you put it to me real slick, like, hey, man, these guys, you know, how they making money? So this has been my question, right? Thank you. I've been dealing with this ever since you educated me on it. You know what I mean? I'm gonna be able to keep asking that. Oh, I'm gonna ask them else. That's why I'm free. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm gonna ask them because at the end of the day, it's a question that needs to come to everybody to where we can get creative control over the music again, to where they can understand. If you ain't making no dollars, it don't make no sense. I'm being real. If they don't do it, then it's gonna, to come on this platform, it's not gonna look right. I need to know. There is an industry that prays on people who want to be in music. I get it. It's a whole thing.   Who's coming down here next week or whatever, you know? Money man or whoever's gonna be here. You wanna be on the show.  You wanna be on the radio, pay this much. You know what you need to do? You need to get you some digital marketing. Pay this, like you, there's all of these different outlets for artists to pay. And then the illusion. Thank you, babe. I just wanted, I didn't want everything.   They looking at people behaving ways and then they thinking that that's what they gotta do too. Music for sure is about your life and the truth that you have and they are acting. But in the process of you acting, this is why I said that probably the most important thing was me learning about my thoughts and my thinking process. You got these kids coming in or these people.     So it's not a surprise to me that some of the dudes that I have seen after getting deals, when everybody be like damn, he dumb, the man is getting powerful in his ability to manifest or female. And as it keeps going and going and going and you started talking about killing whoever and you know this and that. Then you catch the case, the inevitable case. It happens all the time. It's a way to talk about it. That's not ignorant.  I'm reflecting. I'm on the mic reflecting in the illest way possible. I'm just remembering. I'm talking about things that I wanna talk about. You know what I'm saying? I'm trying from a real life experience.  They haven't really perfected the craft.  A lot of people, not everybody, a lot of people that speaking bullshit into existence, they don't have a business model for what it is that they trying to do. And they just really just, and they want things, a lot of people want things that they do not deserve and they know they don't deserve it. You want all of this recognition. You want all of this acknowledgement, but you haven't done the work. You don't even got five songs. You don't got 10 songs. We've seen that, huh? Yeah. And another thing about hip hop as an independent, if you put something out today and you don't put nothing out for a month or two months, you don't remain where you was at when you put that out. You're going backwards. You got to work. It's like a treadmill. Dude, I had... You got to work to go for it. I had a role on here the other night and ended up calling, that's gonna come out next week. Trio Talk, No Peel Talk and Ro and him was going back and forth about that list. Shout out to my mother-in-law. And it was funny because they was really, really, Ro was like, you know, my son came out with a hard living and you know already it was good and you should have put me on that list. And he was like, but you haven't been doing nothing lately. He was like, yeah, but that's still the hardest song down there, but you were just, this is what you were just expressing. I gotta say, Ro wants it. He really, he wants it. I get it, but Trio Talk was saying that he hadn't put nothing out here recently that was, and this was before he just put down this other one. The one, he got a new one that he working on now. Trio is my, I gotta say this.  Well, yeah, he was here a day before yesterday. We had a good time too. That's my dude. I've been knowing him ever since he was all his life. So, but the thing you gotta understand is the thing, the work ethic and putting that music out like you doing in a volume that you're putting it out, that has to be respected and recognized because a lot of guys, look man, you've been through a lot, bro. You got something to say and you've mastered your craft. And can't nobody, I agree with you. I would be really nervous if I was putting my money up against you rapping against somebody that I thought was the best in the world. You know what I mean? And whatever, because I know I done listened to you. I'm not trying to, I'm just being real. I like what you do and y'all need to check him out. Man, I need 300 is the one. Need to truth, man. He really speaking truth, you know? I had a guy on here yesterday, day before yesterday, PGF Shout from Atlanta. He came in, you gotta check him out, man. Nice with it, bro. Like speaking the truth too and came through from the same background. And it's people like you guys who really speak about what's going on.  It's in depositivity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PGF stand for putting God first. Yeah, yeah, he own it, man. And it's like, when you see this, I feel good about the music. It's going back to where a place where it could bring somebody out of a situation, man. Yeah, even if it's not for the, just to see somebody like doing something looking like they progressing in it. But as far as like in life in general, I just artist, man. My mind just be like for artists. That's how I know that one day I'm already like, I'm gonna start signing artists. When did you get a name? No, no, let me ask this, man. Yeah, go on and ask him. I got something real heavy on my mind. The name Audi 300 came from and who gave it to you? Okay, Audi, I always been. My name is Alderian, you know. I like that name, that's it. Yeah, Alderian, that's my name, Alderian, David. Easy to look up. That's why everybody know my name anyway. I can't even be Alderian, David. They know that's my name. I'm from 300 block. I'm from David Street, Long Beach, 300 block. Wow, just like that, yeah. And the next question I have. Whoa, okay, so you're married right now. Yes. And I see you hustling real hard, always doing your craft. How do you balance both life? Work-life balance, you hit you with it. Yeah, that's great. Oh, okay. Well, first of all, my wife is definitely very understanding of what I'm doing, but we're around each other a lot. So you take her to the studios with you? No, but when you're working music, that's like a vibe. And in my case, it's really an energy that the only way I could describe it to somebody else is violent. Okay. Not to say that you're about to do violent, but it is an energy of violence and aggression. That's what I am. Even when I'm relaxed, the feeling of what I'm doing is like, urgh. So I don't really, if I'm writing or if I'm about to record or anything like that, her energy mellows me. So I can come away from a situation and when I'm around her, I can mellow. She makes, it's an automatic mellow. And that's another thing about videos and whatnot. Anything got to do something with rap. I want my energy ill and urgh, you know? So again, I'm with her the majority of the time. Anything I'm about to do with rap, I really don't be wanting her around because I feel like it's like flawed. I feel like I'm going to fight. I feel like, you know. She doesn't come to any performances. She comes, if it's grand enough to where she gonna be like in dresses and stuff like that, I be wanting her around. If it's hood and stuff like that, I don't want her to come. Like I won lyricist of the year in Houston. You know, you want to get dressed up and barred up. Yes, I want her around for that.  I don't want you around.  Yes, and we know whatever, if it go foul or whatever, we gonna be moving as a, you know what I mean?  Especially like, if it's anybody from my hood, just anybody that's around me and we moving on some rap shit, I'm with people that understand consequences, life and death, like all of these types of things.  I love that communication. I love that vibe that y'all have together. Oh yeah, let me ask you man.  You got the algorithm down packed. Algorithm? Yeah, algorithm, meaning you understand how to be have creative control over what you're doing, make dollars out of it, live off of it, and that's why I want to see our people go.  You know what I'm saying? It gotta happen, because at the end of the day, you got a blueprint, okay, the younger people, they gotta be able to look at you and be able to understand, I can tell you that, you can't get it by not doing nothing. And that's the part where it's really, it's like the work ethic, people think cause they get on the internet, views being fake, you mean you talked about that. All type of stuff, I mean, I'm looking at your views. Matter of fact, I wonder if this is real views. Oh my God. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you, if I'm gonna put the South Sun, it's gonna be way more than that. Yeah, I'm gonna put the South Sun, cause I'm gonna tell you, it don't cost nothing. Yeah, I don't know. Well, let me tell you that if you wanted 100,000 views, I think that's $100. Really? You want 400,000? But the reality, and it's not necessarily a bad thing that people are buying views because all of these artists Are buying views. Or their labels Are buying views. Because they want them to be perceived a certain way. If you are, you know, artist A, and you perceived as the biggest artist in the world, you gotta look at the times that these videos, if it's on YouTube, look at the time that they drop. Typically, videos, but before you're aware of them, they have been out for four hours, five hours. A video can exist in a private link on YouTube. So, I mean, it's common. Anybody, anybody with a YouTube channel can have a video on private. So, if you are- And just share the link. And everybody who has the link can see it. And we're gonna boost it up. Right. Before we put it up. Behind the scenes, and put comments on it. Behind the scenes, and then we're gonna release it. And if you're looking at this artist, That makes sense. The biggest artists in the world, or some of the biggest artists that you think are the biggest artists in the world, then it's not gonna ring no alarm to you that it's only been out 46 minutes, or six hours in something. And it's at 786,000 views. And you're like, damn, who all know this? And remembering what a view is as well, that 30 seconds of a watched video is supposedly what counts as a view. You gotta ask yourself the question of how many videos do we watch over and over again? I watch videos all the time. I may watch a video, a music video, I may watch it twice.  So these are just things you gotta remember. See, that's the thing that I always would wonder about, because whenever I watch, before we started the podcast, and I'm on YouTube, I'm always a DIY person. That's what I do. Everybody go on YouTube to learn how to do something. But whenever you're doing it, you fast forward, fast forward, go to the part that you wanna know, stop it, learn how to do it. But someone told me that hurts your channel when people fast forward through it, your view time, compared to actually watching the entire thing. I don't know for long form videos. But it could even be short, because... Well, this is what I'm asking, because I definitely know that watch hours are being tracked. And that's how you get paid. Exactly. So you wanna have long form that people stay engaged in to long. But what's always the big mystery, which shouldn't be a big mystery, is how exactly... How long? Yeah. Right, cause people have short attention spans. Yeah, but... People don't like to sit down and watch something for too long. Nah, if it's good. If it's good. No, no, no, no, no. We'll watch it. Everything goes. You watch movies. For sure. Or two hours, three hours. You know, I don't watch. Yeah, Joe Rogan and all those guys, those guys are $100 million Spotify people. Because even like, look at Breakfast Club. Breakfast Club, they have theirs for like an hour. And when I watch it, I might watch a little part of this part and I'll fast forward and see what else they're talking about. Not me. I watch the whole thing. Or if I let the whole thing go, I'm moving around, so I'm not really just sitting down here watching the whole thing. Guess what I'm doing on a Breakfast Club or anything else? I'm only watching that they're gonna put a clip on if there's an artist or somebody on there that I wanna see. I'm not gonna watch the long form. They know they gotta make a clip, a block for that. If it's just a little clip that's got this little 40 or 35 minute interview session on there, I may watch that. I'm not about to watch the whole Breakfast Club. You know what I mean? And I don't mind that. If I like it, if it's something I wanna hear, I've been interested in, I'll watch it. But if I don't, I won't. I pick certain ones. It's what make me tick. I might not like this one, but if I rock what this do, like, okay, say it's a tip. I've been knowing this dude since I was eight and I've been hearing about different things going on with him. And he come on and I'm like, let's see what's going on with him. I may watch it too. Not watch the thing. You know what I'm saying? But I ain't watching like every. No, not every episode. I'm not gonna watch the whole thing. And that's why a lot of times on our platform, we talk about so many different things because you have so many different type of people out there. Somebody might not wanna just watch it strictly for the rapping.  So there's so many different reasons people watch this show. That's another thing I feel like rappers need to begin like, I think rappers are not really honest about what they're doing that's allowing them to have sustained success. I will tell you that the people that I know that in this industry that got sustained success, they married or been in long committed relationships, why is that so?  Said why, right? Yeah, it's a good why. Also to go along with the fact that it's a good why, it's like the proper foundation. Some people are trying things and they not working and they don't know why it's not working.   So you just kind of, and you believing the rap too much, not thinking that or not understanding that it's entertainment primarily. I'm glad you said that, because that brings me back to something I was thinking when you cut me off or something. I'm sorry. So how, you know, but it's all good though. I know you know me, I ain't trippin' on it, but I'm just gonna go on and try to figure out what I was trying to figure out back then. Okay. I just gave you some extra time.  I think sometimes people would probably say that, but I think rap is huge, man. Rap is huge. And I say that because, you know, movies and stuff come out, you got guns, slingles and all kinds of stuff. So there's a place where you can put it intelligently in the right position, but there are some guys I do, and that don't have nothing to do with you really. Because you do have to take some responsibility for what it is. But I want to, the reason I do it, along with those things of me having my life intertwined in it and using and picking from those things to create music or whatnot, I do it to be the best, to make the best music. Like each one of my albums are like time capsules. They represent a complete idea.  I'm being true to what the track elicits from me.  But I ask people, I say, what do you get from them? And that's what they say, they just say the truth. Like it's just the truth.   And there's a lot of stuff going on. And he said he put all of that intense energy from what was going on at the time only to hear later from people that had graduated college. Like, hey man, that got me through college. But I work out to Get Rich or Die Trying. So it's about what we use the music for.


Okay, so 1 o'clock, so I'll call to order the Green Mountain care boards meeting of February 8, 2023. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We have 1 primary agenda topic, which is the 2024 standard qualified health plan designs and a potential vote. Before we get there, I want to hope that everyone's safe and well. I know there's been some issues at the schools and I hope that everyone's children are safe and doing well. I know a lot of us have young kids, and so I just wanted to share that sentiment. I'll turn it to Susan Barrett for the executive director's report and then we'll take up the minutes from January 1st. Thank you, Mr. Chair. A few brief announcements are in addition to our regularly scheduled meetings on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. next week we have a general primary care advisory group meeting. That starts at 5 p.m. It is via teams with the physical location for those who can't access teams at 144 State Street in Montpelier. I also wanted to thank our general advisory group for meeting this Monday. I believe that it was. We had a very robust discussion on some of the work that the board is doing with AHS on Act 167 of 2022. We don't have any public comment periods open except for the ongoing public comment where we're accepting any public comment regarding the next all-payer model agreement. We share those with AHS and the governor's office as they are leading the implementation of the current all-payer model and negotiations on a potential next model. So with that, I will turn it back to you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. We'll turn to the minutes from February 1st 2023. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? I move we approve the minutes from February 1st 2023. Second. So definitively, I like it. These must be really great minutes this week. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. And the vote is unanimous and the minutes are approved. With that, we'll turn it over to Dana Hulahan in connection with the 2024 standard qualified health plan designs. Mr. Hulahan, how are you? Nice to see you. Good afternoon. Thank you for having us back. So today we have prepared, I would say, we wakely at our direction has prepared some contextual information that we thought would be helpful for the board. This doesn't introduce any new proposals. It's really just providing a little bit more color around some of the segments of the presentation that could just use a bit more detail. So we're going to start with that and then come back to me for an overview of the January 2023 enrollment as it looks on the exchange. So, Darren or Julie, I'd like to turn to you. Yeah, could you switch me to our presenter? I know we had to do that last week too, so I couldn't share my screen. Apologies, I've already done that. Yeah, no problem. Raise your name. Perfect. That worked. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Someone did it. Yeah, so just wanted to kind of touch on a few things from last week where we felt like we probably shouldn't include a little more detail to provide some context to kind of what was changing with the AB calculator and what made it different this year versus kind of a typical year and how that kind of impacted decision making when putting the standard plan designs together both this year and kind of going forward and how we think about those things. So just a quick outline this shouldn't take long at all. So going back to the 2024 federal AB calculator with the changes to the logic. I don't think I spent enough time on this. So the way the calculator was set up in the past was that if a plan had say a $3,000 deductible and a $50 copay on specialist office visits with a deductible not applying, it would count every single specialist office visit copay towards that deductible, not just towards the loop.  Whereas in practice, you know, every plan I've ever seen would not accrue those copays towards the deductible. You pay your $200 of copays, you'd have your stay, you'd pay $300 deductible. Did this change grow, let me see, this change increase actuarial values as calculated in the calculator because they're accruing all these copays towards deductibles, which means it's your deductible sooner, it's a richer plan. So this year when they kind of corrected that, so that the AB calculator was in line with, you know, the way pretty much every plan actually adjudicates that dropped AB calculator values down. You know, in some cases substantially depending on the plan that kind of gave us this one year break and like the steady uptick of, you know, a calculated ABs and see. Yeah, I'll send some per second. And that uptick is just due to kind of the trend in claims. So as we mentioned, you know, this year they're applying 5% medical training, 8% pharmaceutical training. So every year these claims kind of take up and up and up, you know, $3,000 deductible gets more and more rich because more and more claims over that $3,000 trend. So there's kind of that steady ratcheting up of actuarial values with the same plan design. This year we kind of get that one year break in it because of that change in logic. So that change, it's not anything that's impacting, you know, standard plan designs, anything that's impacting how anything would actually be implemented on the Vermont side. It's just the logic in the schedule calculator has changed, which gave us a little more wiggle room kind of on a one time basis. Okay, so then, so going back to kind of this slide of what we're actually seeing. So, you know, gold stayed mostly the same silver we saw that decrease. You know, we had a bunch of plans that change kind of differently that we would normally impact. So we wanted to put a slide together of kind of what we what we normally actually see. So we've got the plans broken down off to the left here, you know, min and max probably not as impactful, but this is kind of the average year over year change we typically see an AB for each of these plans. You know, this is going back to, I want to say, 2016. So we have a substantial amount of years of AB calculator updates. So on average, every year they release a new calculator, the gold plan design goes up 1.3% before we change anything. And if that bumps it up past that 82% now it's out of compliance and we have to reduce benefits to get it back into compliance. You know, the silver deductible plan for whatever reason seems to be especially impacted by these kind of year over year updates, an average change of almost 1.7%. So again, every year you you have this really big ratcheting effect that's happening that we have to counteractive plan designs. You know, this year, the actual change we saw, you know, was obviously dramatically different for some of these plans, you know, so much deductible that plan has a lot of copays. So this change was especially impactful, you know, the silver HD HP, you know, got a lot of copays mostly just deductible loop. Didn't really change the story at all on that one or the Bronx without our excellent plan. So, you know, that was definitely very helpful this year, you know, there were a couple plans where, you know, we didn't have to increase the deductible at all. Because we kind of had this one time one time benefit of their changing logic, but just want to spend a little more time on that to kind of show the average changes year over year just, you know, that's the federal value increasing that kind of what we're what we have to counteract just to stay in compliance with with AV ranges. We also had another question on just what deductibles applied to in the different plans to just put together a quick table of kind of where the deductible is waved or applies. So platinum gold, silver deductible, pretty standard way for preventive office visits that's primary care and specialist urgent care and your ambulance. And then drag its way for generic scripts. And then on, you know, the rest of the plans, mostly it's just way for preventive. And then wellness and goes between just wellness scripts or generic scripts, wellness and generic for some of the other ones. So I think this plan design is probably the one that caused the most confusion or the bronze deductible plan with the pharmacy limit. So we have the medical deductibles only way for preventive. But then we have all these categories with that have copays. So in this case, you know, the members responsible up to 6450 and then between 64 and 9450, you know, they, they get some of the benefit. They just have the copays instead of having, you know, the co insurance rates. And then once they had 9450, obviously they're cost sharing. So, you know, this is definitely a somewhat confusing plan design because we have all these copays, but then, you know, on the medical side, it's only way for preventive. And then on the pharmacy side, it is way for generic drugs. So just wanted to run through that kind of plan design quick because that one's that one's a little confusing. Okay, so hopefully hopefully that helped kind of clear things up a little bit around the A.B. calculators. I know that can get very technical with kind of the updates they do every year, but I thought it was worth taking the time to explain that a little more and kind of show that the average changes. Any questions on that? One point to add to it's not it's not that the deductible is waived. Precisely, but as of last year, remember we made the design change to have the first three. Office visits or behavioral behavioral health or medical office visits at no cost share. So that's in addition to the treatment of deductible, but for those first three, we made that valuable addition. Just want to remind everybody of that. Is there anything else, Mr. Hulan or are you? Well, I can move to the overview of enrollment unless there are questions on this information from weekly. Okay, to move on. Yes, please. Thank you. Okay. People see my screen. Not yet. Darren, do you need to stop sharing or am I doing something wrong? I believe I did. Okay. So this is just an overview of the on exchange enrollment. And this is covered lives not by household. So this first slide just shows it by plan type. And so comparing 2022 covered lives in January to 2023 total enrollment is down about 1000. That's over. Comparing this number and this number here. So this is fairly consistent with what Addie mentioned last week that largely we think due to people staying on Medicaid that this is down and that, you know, sometime later in 2023, some unknown number is likely to transfer from Medicaid coverage to qualified health plan. So we'll be watching this closely to see how that changes. Specifically, we were asked about the enrollment in the plans that are impacted by the CSR. That's the 73 and 77% CSR levels. We've got a just over 1000 in the 73%. CSR level four and about 2000 in the 77%. So those two cohorts would be impacted by the removal of V CSR if that goes forward. So shifting to this color chart, this focuses on the changes in bimetal level and plan type year over year. So it's really down in most categories except for bronze, which is slightly up and the no CSR silver plan or silver plan type is up a bit. But again, down a little over a thousand overall. So I hope that's helpful. I really just wanted to provide that in the next month or so we will have the coverage map will come out, which is a broader look at all of the enrollment across different across different categories and including the small group and issue or direct enrollment. So we will certainly share that with the board. So that's what we prepared to show today. So turn it back to you. I guess if there are questions or other things that we can we can provide or answer today. Great. Thank you. And I'll open it up to the board for any questions or comments from the board. Just go ahead and speak up if you have any questions or comments. My only comment is I see that you and member Walsh must go to the have the same shopping experiences. I'll turn it to the health care advocate for any questions or comments they may have. Hi, Chair Foster. This is Charles Becker staff attorney with the office of the health care advocate. Just three quick points about the 2024 plan designs. First, I wanted to just say kudos to Dana will hand for running very efficient meetings and to the weekly team for their clear presentations and made making some difficult decisions a little bit easier to do. Regarding the plan adjustments, I just wanted to say that although those these are really minor adjustments, you know, we're talking about a few hundred dollars in the deductible here, a couple hundred dollars in the move there, some co pay adjustments here and there. That's really kind of cold comfort to Vermonters who, you know, even after paying their premiums are reluctant or even afraid to use their plans because they can't afford the cost sharing. So, you know, even though the 80 calculator limits the kinds of choices that we can make, it's still important to recognize that beyond premiums, cost sharing raises significant concerns are regarding affordability and access for for many Vermonters. But that was just an important point to make. And then third, regarding the premiums themselves, I think Wakeley's modeling showed that these plan adjustments would result in premium increases of around 1% give or take a few tenths of a percentage point. So it will be interesting to see when the rates are filed in May, whether the rate increases are closer to historical norms or whether we again see double digit increases like we saw last year. And I'm sure we can hopefully all assume that it will hope that it will be the former. And that's really all I wanted to say on behalf of the HCA. And so thank you for giving us the opportunity to comment today, Chair Foster. Thank you. Mr. Becker on the affordability piece. Does your website have some resources about the impacts of affordability and people's ability to pay the cost sharing components of these? I think I've been on there and seen some materials. You know, I'm not sure quite off the bat. If we do have any of those resources, let me take a look for you and get back to you if I can. Okay. Yeah. No, great. Of course. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And with that, I'll open it up to public comment. Please use the raise your hand function. I'll call on folks in the order in which their hands are raised. Mr. Carpenter, how are you, Walter? Hey, all in. Hey. I'm hanging in there. My second GMCB meeting of the week, so I won't go through withdrawal symptoms. You do as many as I do. Maybe more, right? Historically, definitely. Yeah. Historically, you're right. Probably about a thousand. Anyway, I just wanted to back up the legal aids comment and say that the only thing exceptional about American healthcare is how it screws the patient with these deductibles. Typical Walter comment. We appreciate all of the comments we receive and I appreciate you stepping up and making your comments, Walter. So thank you for doing it. Are there any other public comments? Hearing none, I'll move. And I move to approve the 2024 qualified health plan designs as presented by the Department of Vermont Health Access. I'll second. And all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Sorry, Dr. Murman, I didn't hear you. Yes. Sorry. Issues. No, no, that's fine. And I'm also an eye. So the vote is unanimous. And it carries. Well, we thank you. And as I'm understanding, there will be no modifications we would go with the proposed designs in each case. That's correct. Thank you. Thank you for your presentations and making this very easy for us to understand a complex area, especially for myself as a new member. So thank you. Thank you all. Great. And with that, we'll turn to any new business. Old business. And is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. And the motion carries. Everyone have a nice day. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Who's excited for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon? Let me hear y'all. Woo! I like the wooers. That's really awesome. All right. So I'm Michelle Norrely. I'm all the things that Dan mentioned. Thanks for that intro, Dan. I'm also, so I'm co-chair of this conference. I've had a great time putting together the schedule alongside Kelsey Hightower. We've got lots of great sessions scheduled for you. In addition to normal talks and sessions, we're also going to be getting updates from SIGs. If you're wondering what a SIG is, SIG stands for Special Interest Group. This is how we in the CloudNative community get together and talk about specific areas of interest. There will also be SIG deep dive sessions. These are longer, more collaborative sessions for you to participate in, as well as for you to get to know one another in person. In addition to that, we'll also have technical salons today, tomorrow, and Friday.  There are contributors and experts from all of the CNCF projects here at this event ready and willing to help you get started, answer any questions you might have, even walk you through tutorials. So really take advantage of that. And also, we work on these complex distributed systems, ourselves being distributed all over the world and across time zones. So take advantage of this opportunity. And I encourage you at any level of experience to take advantage of this opportunity to meet people in three dimensions today, tomorrow, and Friday. So the CNCF currently hosts 14 projects. This is insane, one, because the CNCF is less than two years old and two, because the CNCF was hosting just eight projects in March of this year at the last Cloud NativeCon and KubeCon event in Berlin. It's remarkable to me how quickly things are moving, how many organizations are coming together, and how much the community has grown. I mean, seriously, from up here, I have an amazing view. Raise your hand if this is your very first Cloud NativeCon or KubeCon conference. That's actually more than I was expecting. That's a lot of y'all. That's a lot of y'all, because the last event was less than half the size. And all of the conferences before this one don't even match the number of people that are here today. So I think this cloud thing is like working out, which is good for me. And check out what the Cloud Native landscape looks like today. Like Dan mentioned, the box items are official CNCF projects. Today, I'm going to prime you with some information about these 14 box projects so that you can have a solid foundation to take with you for the rest of the event. And also, so you're not totally completely lost when you hear all the acronyms. But let's get into how in the world we even got here in the first place. Well, we had the rise of microservices, which is this idea that you have loosely coupled services that implement business logic and are independently deployable. This is great for your organization because you can now have teams that have specialized areas of concern. And those teams are also enabled to deliver changes faster and more frequently. We also saw the increasing need to decouple the application from the environment that it's running in, so the infrastructure it's running on, with the rise of the cloud. And Amazon had a lot to do with that. It suddenly became a waste of time to manage your own physical infrastructure. And being in the cloud, renting servers, this became more and more of a default choice. And that in itself pushes us to decouple our applications from the infrastructure that it's running on.  And Kubernetes takes that concept of portability to a whole other level, because you can deploy, scale, and manage your containerized applications in public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud, and bare-metal environments. Kubernetes was also the first project to be donated to the CNCF. And it also inspired the creation of the CNCF because Google wanted to donate this technology to a vendor-neutral party. And from there, the CNCF has been building this powerful toolkit that enables us to build and scale these modern application architectures and environments. Look at where we are now. Three of the largest cloud providers announced their own managed Kubernetes services. Yeah, that's right, you can clap for that. That's amazing, that's amazing, because Kubernetes is less than three years old. In a week or so, we'll be announcing the release of Kubernetes 1.9, bringing us a stable core workloads API. 1.9 will also have beta support for Windows Server containers. That means customers will be able to run Windows-based and .NET-based containers on Kubernetes, making this space even more open. We'll also see a big win in the cloud-native storage space with CSI support in alpha. The container storage interface enables out-of-tree volume plugins in Kubernetes. Now, if you're thinking, well, why does this even matter? Let me tell you, enabling CSI support in Kubernetes lowers the barrier of entry for storage vendors wanting to support Kubernetes, giving us all more storage options in the long run and further preventing the risk of vendor lock-in. And like we're seeing with the CSI initiative, these higher-order systems like Kubernetes depend on other loosely-coupled cloud-native technologies and components. CoreDNS is a great example of that. CoreDNS is a generic DNS server that can talk to multiple backends, like XB, Kubernetes, caching middleware, and others due to its plugin-style architecture. Today, I get to announce that CoreDNS is 1.0, and it'll be available in 1.9, Kubernetes 1.9, on an alpha basis as a replacement for Kube DNS, adding even more features than we currently have and more performant functionality. There's a CoreDNS technical salon happening today at 340 if you're interested in learning more. Another component to know about is container D, an industry-standard container runtime.  So it's a pretty central component in this space. Container D was originally built by Docker with feedback from the five largest cloud providers. It was integrated in Docker as a version 1.11, and you can even use Container D in Kubernetes via an internal API called Container Runtime Interface. And if you're not familiar with CRI, it's the thing in Kubernetes that makes it possible to swap out container runtimes without the need to recompile Kubernetes itself. And today, I get to announce that Kubernetes is also 1.0. I think I already mentioned that. All right, so, oh, no, I didn't.  Yeah, that's really awesome. Container D and Rocket were donated to the CNCF at the same time in March in Berlin. Rocket was originally introduced by CoreOS. Currently, this team is working on Rocket Let, which is a CRI implementation to integrate with Kubernetes. This one project has had a huge impact on the cloud-native community. Rocket was built to implement the original spec for container runtimes called APSI, which was built for security in mind. And then that culminated into OCI, which is the current Container Runtime industry-accepted standard. Another project that came out of Rocket was the Container Networking Interface, or CNI. And most of this, take this one for granted, actually. Most of us take this one for granted. And this is the specification and API for connecting and improving containerized workloads from the network. It's used by Rocket, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Meizos, and the list goes on. CNI is also approaching a 1.0 release. The maintainers are looking for feedback on what you'd like to see in 1.0. So if you have something, get in their issue queue and let them know. We've talked so far about projects and the CNCF that enable you to work with containers and make your workloads portable. And that's important for building the services that power your business. But just running containers isn't going to be enough.  I found it interesting that Twitter, a company known for its microservices architecture, has its own observability engineering team that focuses on this area. Let's switch gears and talk about a set of projects under the CNCF that fall into this category of observability. Starting with container monitoring with Prometheus. Here with us today is Tom Wilkie, Prometheus developer. Please help me welcome Tom. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. Wow, this is a very big crowd, isn't it? So Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database, really specifically designed for dynamically scheduled environments like Kubernetes. It's got a powerful, concise query language, a really efficient storage engine, a really simple operational model, and was the second project accepted into the CNCF after Kubernetes. I'm really here today to talk mainly about Prometheus 2.0, the second major Prometheus release we did on November the 8th. Fabian noticed basically that with Prometheus 1.0, really highly dynamic Kubernetes environments would put a bit of strain on the storage engine, especially if you're doing things like continuous deployment and had a high churn of very short-lived containers. So he developed along with Brian and Gutham, who's in the crowd somewhere, a brand new storage engine for Prometheus, significantly improving the performance. This is a graph. The top line is Prometheus 1.5, the bottom line is Prometheus 2.0. We see about a 3x reduction in CPU usage, a 2x reduction in disk base, and over a 100x reduction in I.O. It's hugely performant, and these are real-world use case numbers that you'll get if you run it. Next, I'd like to talk about the Prometheus community. We've had an absolutely stellar year. We had some impressive stats from the Grafana Chaps who announced that our growth in the Prometheus usage has been over 5x since 2016. We've also, like all good GitHub projects, measure our success in stars, and we've had more than, well, we've had almost a 2x increase in our GitHub stars in the last year.  The latest one in August in Munich had over 220 attendees. That's almost three times bigger than our previous conference. I'd just like to thank Richard and Julius for organizing this. Finally, today, we've got a jam-pack schedule for Prometheus events. We're running a Prometheus salon at 10 past 11, various other talks, you can see them on the slides. Finally, we're going to finish up with some drinks at 8 p.m., go to the Prometheus blog if you want to sign up and find out more details about that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. All right. Here with us today to talk about logging and fluency is Eduardo Silva, software engineer at Treasure Data. Please help me welcome Eduardo. Hello, everyone. Wow, this is huge compared to Berlin, as Michelle said. Well, before to start talking about fluency, I would like to start talking about logging. And logging in general exists because just one reason is because you want to do some kind of data analysis, which means to try to get some insights from your own applications. And how do we accomplish that? There are many ways, but everybody knows that if we want to do or extract data from applications, we have some ways in which we take our applications and let our applications generate some messages to the file system or we ship these messages over the network to a distributed place, like a database or a remote server. But that's one thing. But if we want to do data analysis and if you have multiple applications and you consider now that we have containers, orchestrators, you have to consider that you need to centralize all of this information in one place. So how to solve that problem? It's not easy from the beginning, but every problem, if you understand it very well, you can come up with the right solution. And the strategy from an engineering perspective was, okay, we have a problem, we have different messages from different places, and we come up with a design which is called the Logging Pipeline, which said, okay, you have some messages that are arriving through some input. Maybe you need to filter this information, parse this information, store it somewhere, and then ship this information back. At the beginning, it's not that easy to understand, but basically you have an input and you need an output. But in the middle, when working with logging, there are many things that are really relevant. Data transformation is one of them. And that's what Fluendee is. A full solution like log aggregation, log transformation that allows you to connect to the data from one place to another, with a strong focus on logging, of course. And, okay, we understand what is the problem with logging, and most of you or half of you are using Fluendee, from my perspective. So we have some news. And today, this morning, our principal maintainer of Fluendee, Masahiro, has announced that Fluendee 1.0 has been released. Thank you. Thanks also to the whole feedback that we have get from the community. You, as an individuals, as representatives, companies, has made this possible. You have to understand that behind us a project, they are engineers, they are team, but also there's people who's providing the right feedback. You know what? You are doing this wrong. And from a project perspective, if we can fix that, it means that we are solving the problem better. And that's the whole thing. Today we are doing this, but tomorrow we have to make it better. So let's move forward to the, what else? Okay, 1.0 also comes with multi-process support. It supports also sub-second time resolution. We have included native TLS and encryption inside Fluendee. So it will be more easily to make the plugins ecosystem work in a secure way when sending data from one place to another. Also performance is a critical thing. So we come up with a new design for storing the data into the local buffers for reliability. And of course, when you talk about containers and cloud, also you have to consider that sometimes the logs needs to be sent to a different place, needs to be cheaper. And sometimes the network fails, you have power outage and things does not go well. That's why we have a protocol, which is called Forward, which aims to be used to send logs from one place to another. But also, that is not at all.  And when you talk about logging, logging is one thing. From the beginning it sounds like, okay, I'll look at the logs, but it's times more than that. And if you think carefully and you look at the future, you can imagine that the data is flowing from one place to another over and over. So the next natural step, of course, is to keep continue making Fluendee more integrated with services like Kafka for data streaming. So the strong focus for Fluendee will be to make more friendly with data streaming services like Kafka. And as of now, we have a secure Kafka connectors. It's very secure. We have a support Kerberos and all the things that in the Kafka site are required for security. Okay, so one thing is logs, the others connecting to data streaming. But also, when you think about how your systems are working, you would like to have some notions about how your logging pipeline, on this case, Fluendee, it's working internally. And that's why our investment has been also in a better integration with Prometheus. And we're happy to know that with all this coming out of 1.0, we are also improving our monitoring for our logging pipeline. So data streaming, monitoring, but also cross-platform is really important. That's why Fluendee 1.0 has been imported to Windows systems and can work reliable for your Windows services. And you can imagine from the beginning that this does not sound too natural, but there are many Windows services running around. And also, they have the same problem. They have a lot of feedbacks, a lot of log messages from different applications, and they need to centralize these, partition information, and ship this out. So that's why Fluendee 1.0 on Windows also is a huge win for everybody this year. And some community stats. You have to consider that Fluendee as a core project. I will say that it's a little bit small, but the huge value is in the ecosystem. You have to consider that we have more than 700 plugins available for Fluendee. And I'm happy to say that maybe the core developers maintain no more than 20. All of the older plugins are made by individuals and companies to solve different integration. And when I say plugins, I mean a plugin is used to collect information from an input to apply a special filter or a custom parser or send this information to a custom output or destination. And in our official repository, there are many repositories for Fluendee. We have around 50,000 Docker pools a day and growing. That is a huge number. And in the last month, it's increasing like crazy. And also from a core perspective, we have more than 100 of developers who has contributed this year. And from an ecosystem project or service, we can see that we have 500 contributors. So I would say that Fluendee is growing a lot. And that means it's not just about growing. Also it's about solving the problem better, as I said before. And I'm happy to say that Fluendee, it's becoming an industry standard for logging. And it's not just me saying this, it's the companies who are adopting this technology. More than 2,000 companies are using Fluendee open source in their own production environments. Okay, Fluendee is a project. We have plugins, we have community. But also I would like to say that Fluendee is a whole ecosystem. And as part of the ecosystem, we have more components. And always we are looking for, okay, how we can make it better? How we can improve performance? How we can make it lightweight? Sometimes we get some feedback. Fluendee, it's right, it works. But sometimes it's consuming a lot of memory. Okay, sometimes it's improved the configuration. But in the other scenarios, it's okay. There are critical environments that generate 1,000 and 1,000 of logs and messages per second. So how we can make it better? How we can make it stable? So I'm happy to introduce you to a new child project of the Fluendee ecosystem, which is called Fluendee. Fluendee has been developed for a long two years. It started as a lightweight solution to forward logs to Fluendee. But it got a lot of traction in the last time. And with a lot of traction, I mean the feedback from the users was, please, can you start integrating with this database? Or can I use InfluxDB? Okay, so Fluendee started to grow and also behave as an alternative to implement the same login pipeline. That does not mean that it's competing with Fluendee, but has a different focus for different needs. And Fluendee is reading in C language, which I said that is one of the most attractive things for most of the users. Also it has a pluggable architecture. We have 35 plugins. So if we have C developers here, you can start contributing your plugins, but also I have to say that you can write your own plugins in Golang. That is a really, really good thing. So we have some community members writing their own Golang plugins and being integrated inside Fluendee. And Fluendee also is fully asynchronous, event-driven, and of course, it has a small memory footprint. That is part of the core. But from integration with all services, this month we are releasing an next release, Theriodar 13, which will have full integration with Kafka, with Prometheus. It already can work really well on Kubernetes, append filters, you can append labels, metadata, and all that kind of information that is really relevant for the login scenario. So the roadmap is December. We're having the next version. And for the next year, we want to focus on a really new buffering mechanism and advanced filtering for everybody. And if you are around the conference, we would like to invite you to participate and get with the Fluendee community. We have the Fluendee Salon today. We have the whole Fluendee. Most of the core developers are here. They flow from Europe, from Japan and South America. So take advantage of that. So join us and thanks for coming and keep using Fluendee. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Eduardo. All right. We make a request in a distributed system. Tracing can help you understand the journey of that transaction. The Open Tracing project consists of vendor-neutral open standard and instrumentation for distributed tracing, making it easier to integrate within your projects and without having to be locked into a specific tracing vendor. The Open Tracing project consists of language APIs that implement the distributed tracing standard. The project recently added four new language APIs, bringing the total number to nine. This team has also been working on Nginx, SDO, Envoy, and LinkD integration. Open Tracing has a vibrant ecosystem as well. Check out these stats. Jaeger is a distributed tracing system that implements the Open Tracing API. You can use Jaeger to trace a single transaction throughout your architecture and visualize it. Jaeger was originally built by the engineering team at Uber. And this project's team members have been working on UI improvements, usability improvements for viewing large traces. It also supports multiple backends like Cassandra and Elasticsearch and has several new client or several client libraries with C++, the one being the newest. And they're currently working on integration with other CNCF projects. So we talked about all the container bits, which allow you to run lots of different services in a portable fashion. And then we talked about how you observe what's going on with all of those services. But the whole goal is for your system to act reliably in the first place. In the world of complex topology of services, this concept of a service mesh has become increasingly important to ensure reliable communication between services. Here to talk to us about one such service mesh called LinkerD is Oliver Gold. He's a maintainer of the LinkerD project and CTO at Boyant. Please help me welcome Oliver Gold to the stage. Hi, KubeCon or CloudNativeCon, I guess. Ah, how's everyone doing? Okay, before I talk about LinkerD, I know a lot of you have laptops out and phones and you're not really listening to me, so I wanna ask you to go to emoji.voto and just vote on your favorite emojis throughout my talk. Hopefully you'll do a really cool demo in about a minute. We'll see. So the last six months since I last spoke to you in Berlin, the LinkerD team has been exceedingly busy. We've done a release about every two weeks, but more importantly than the LinkerD team, you folks have been really, really busy. You're adopting LinkerD, you're testing it out, you're bringing it into production, you're writing really good issues and PRs that get to the heart of the things and are helping us learn a lot about the service mesh ecosystem. Most importantly, a lot of you have shared the challenges working with LinkerD, you've given really honest and constructive feedback, and you've told us about the challenges that your organizations and teams face in moving to new technology systems. And so I know it's a scary new world of new technology, but I really do appreciate that a lot, many of you have been so open in sharing your problems and challenges with us. And that's led us to think a lot about the service mesh and LinkerD's place in it and the future of the service mesh now that we have this word for what that is. And talking with many of our customers and users that we've kind of come on something new. Now I'm really happy to introduce a new project called Conduit. It is not related to LinkerD explicitly, except many of the people who worked on LinkerD and have been supporting LinkerD for years also worked on Conduit. There's a lot you can find out online about this, and I'm not gonna get too much into the weeds in this talk, but I do wanna try to show you what it does and why you might care about it. So let's see if this demo actually works. All right, so hopefully you've seen this page at this point. If you have a computer out and you've played with it, I would bet that if you've clicked around enough, you've probably found some problems. It doesn't quite work perfectly because it's software. And so if we look at Kubernetes, we'll see that we've got this service running. And Kubernetes says everything's running, it's healthy. It's green, wonderful. But we still have these problems that I can't know about. And so I'm gonna show you how easy it is to use Conduit to figure this out. First things first, I'm just gonna install Conduit. I'm not touching the running system. This is running in its own namespace, totally aside. Totally separate. You can see we installed Prometheus as part of that. And that'll start over the next few seconds. You can look and see it's running just a small little cluster there. And so the magic really happens when we add our new sidecar, our Conduit sidecar, into the running app while it's running and while you're clicking on it, and hopefully nothing goes down. That's the trick, huh? Okay, here we go. Boom, we're redeploying our app while you're clicking on it. And now there's a sidecar running dealing with all of the inter-service communication. And I just wanna start getting some information about what's going on in the system. And so I'm gonna do this watch command. And hopefully as the cluster rolls and as you click around, we're gonna start to see some things here. I can't force that to happen. This could be a Wi-Fi issue, of course. Oh, there we go. And we see some things staying out. Most of the things are 100% success rate. One of them is at zero. That's bad. What is going on? And so we see request rates and we see latencies, latencies quite low. And below, what can we do to find out more about this failing endpoint? And so what I think is maybe the coolest part of conduit or really makes me happy is this tap command. And what tap does is it sends this query. I say I wanna look at this one method. It sends this query into all the proxies as they're running and fetches them out and puts them right on my CLI for you if the wireless works. Oh look, immediately. Thank you. Yeah, we see we have failures. These are GRPC failures. We see a 200 status code. So most things would say this is fine but we see a GRPC status of unknown. We have found the problem. And this is all running live, just pointing an RPC into the proxy and pulling data at it. It's beautiful. So that must, you know, most of you link to users say, well, that might be at least 100 megs to do that, right? Well, no. We've got much better. Here we see the proxy running at about a meg. That's really good. That's the, yeah, really, really cool. Oh, one more thing. This also has a really beautiful dashboard that I don't have time to show off. It does a lot of cool stuff. And it's brand new. Okay, I'm ready to go back to the slides. Oh, thank you. So Conduit does not replace Linkerty. Well, Linkerty is supported. We're gonna continue to make it better, make it work for everyone. Conduit is a new kind of clean break for us to really focus on the lightweight zero configuration aspects of what we think a service mesh should be.  We have a booth, the buoyant booth, over in the sponsor area. There's a panel, my co-founder, William's on right after this. And I'll be doing an Linkerty salon tomorrow where I'd be happy to talk about any of the details of this. So please go to Conduit.io, check it out, download it, run it in your mini cube, and give us feedback. That's really what we want. So yeah, thanks again everyone, have a great day. Thanks Oliver. All right, let's talk about Envoy. The network is inherently unreliable. This problem gets even worse and more painful in a complex system of distributed services. Envoy is an edge and service proxy that makes the network transparent to applications. It runs alongside an application and abstracts the network by providing some common features in a platform and language agnostic manner. Envoy was originally built at Lyft and ended up being deployed as an edge proxy and then as a sidecar service or service proxy forming a mesh over hundreds of services at Lyft, transitioning millions of requests per second. When all service traffic goes through a mesh like this, it becomes much easier to visualize the problem areas, tune performance, and ensure that your services are communicating reliably. Envoy is at a 1.5 O release today with a GRPC v2 API now production ready. Envoy is also experiencing amazing community growth. That project is now at over 100 contributors. GRPC is an open source RPC framework released by Google. In GRPC, a client application can directly call methods on a server application on a different machine as if it were a local object, making it easier to create distributed applications and services. Google has benefited from having something like GRPC internally, something like a uniform cross-platform RPC infrastructure that has allowed them to roll out fleet-wide improvements in efficiency, security, reliability, and behavior analysis, a key for supporting the type of growth that Google has experienced. The team is currently working to support more languages and improving connectivity and performance. The community release cadence is really strong and there's several sessions on GRPC today if you're interested in learning more. So so far, we've talked about projects that enable you to run containers in your cloud-native environment. We talked about how to observe what's going on with these cloud-native applications. And then we talked about ensuring reliability with your services. This last one is important because nobody likes to be stepped, not even your microservices. Those are my friends. Yeah, there's more cheesy cloud-native metaphors coming up by the way, so get ready. Last but not least, let's talk about two projects new to the CNCS in the realm of security. One problem with the internet is that everyone's trying to lie to you. And this gets even more terrifying when you're trying to update your software. I don't know if you've noticed lately. TUF is a software update spec perfect for people who are paranoid. It expects that attackers will compromise server's keys and anything that they can get their hands on. The goal is to retain as much security as possible when that happens. TUF has been making strides in the IoT and automotive space as well. This team has been working on minor extensions with the community around key rotation and other security feature enhancements. Notary is an example of a project that has adopted TUF. Notary can be added to any digital distribution system to ensure the secure download of packages and we look forward to a 0.6 release from them very soon. The Docker platform, the Moby project, Motorola Solutions, VMware, Linux, KIT, Quay, and Kubernetes are all using Notary in TUF. I'll just end with, it's super important for us as a community to provide a solution for trusted cross-platform delivery of content to ensure no bad blood at the end of the day. I know that one's bad too. If you want more cheesy, cloud native metaphors, I'll be here all day. That's all I have for the project updates. I hope that you learned something and it's really cool to me to see this community grow. A lot of these projects that are coming up have been around because people have been experiencing all these problems in a cloud-native environment, but they've just, we're coming together, we're learning from each other, we're sharing problems and solutions, and yeah, it's cheesy, but it's really cool. And so I'm really excited to have all of you here today, your first cloud native gone in KubeCon conference. And next up,


So now we'd like to hear from Steve O'Day, Clydesdale Bank. Hi, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm Steve O'Day from Clydesdale Bank, Clydesdale New Yorkshire Bank. I'm a technical consultant in the bank and my roles are technical lead in our platform engineering team. The platform engineering team is a team that have brought OpenShift into the bank. I'm going to talk a little bit on why we chose OpenShift. We, about three years ago, started work on a digital brand called B. That digital brand was a star of our digital transformation. And like most others, it involved building a microservice architecture.  The good, we saw the benefits. We can scale little bits up, we can scale bits down. We can keep small little changes going. We saw the bad, which was the configuration. We now had to manage configuration to 40, 50 different components rather than one, as well as the dependencies of all of those. And we saw the ugly, which was the amount of time and effort it took just to manage that and to get it into production and just to then keep it going to make it better. So based on that, we started to look at how could we do it better with containers. Some of the benefits that we hoped to get from our operational platform, as we call it, or from the platform of the service was the auto scaling, the auto healing, the service location. So we've now built an API gateway, which uses the Kubernetes APIs to allow us to, when a new microservice comes up, it automatically reconfigures the gateway for us and allows us to expose what we need to be exposed.  So our containers automatically get the application performance management built in. We don't need to remember to get it added in. We don't need to tell the developers you need to do this. So that's great. We started to enable build and burn environments. So we don't need to worry about how many people are going into the same environment. Every developer can have almost an environment on their laptop. They can then take it through the pipeline and build new environments as they need it. And we've also then been able to get it to integrate with the rest of the system. One of the things that we did do was to fix the problem that we've seen with configuration and dependency management, we started to build some of our own tooling. Now, we've done this about two years ago, and we've been working on it. And it's only recently we started to realize that we'd started to build a service broker. We didn't put all the right APIs around it, but we've got all the sort of the workings there. So that's somewhere where we're going next. And just finally to share a little bit of one of the successes, the first application we took on to the PaaS, usually we would release monthly. And it would take between a month, two months. So you'd maybe get in a three-month period, one or two releases. The first service we brought on, we built it 52 times, deployed it 89 times into different test environments, and then deployed it 36 times into production in a three-month period. So we really started to see that we could get the bank moving towards a continuous delivery practice. And that's all from me. Thank you, Steve.