Okay, we're back. It's a five o'clock block. I'm Jay Fidel here on ThinkTech. Let me throw two words at you and see what you think. Brad Coates. Oh, God. That's Brad Coates. Well, I know what I think. Okay.  And he's one of the leaders of Coates, Fry, Tenomoto, and Gibson. That'd be us. You expanded the name Good For You after all these years, yeah. Yeah. I had run that firm myself for 20 years, then I brought Fry in for another 20 years, and this is the first time ever that we've added a couple new partners. And you've managed to weather all the storms. All the storms. We're not dead yet. So this book ahead of us, in front of us on the stand, is a book about divorce that you wrote. Correct. Because you're a prolific author, as a matter of fact. I have written and rewritten that book five different times for the University of Hawaii Press over a, God, I guess it's going on a 25-year treatment to have done that because it's a contribution to the community, for sure. Well, thanks, Jay. And so, and really, it's a starting point for our discussion today because our discussion today springs off that in the sense that, you know, divorce and marriage are sort of at the core of our social system, aren't they? Well, they have been. They have been. That's what we're going to talk about a little bit today. Way back. Correct. In the clan of the Bear Cave. Way back. You know, the commitment of male to female or whatever it is. Society's been structured around that for centuries, and now it's changing really fast. Yeah. So let's bring it to our discussion today, which is social megatrends, sea changes, if you will, in the social fabric of our society, not only here but elsewhere. So let's talk about some of the sea changes you've identified. I made a little list, and maybe we can go down the list that I made on the basis of your list. First, the change of the role of women in our world. Huge. Absolutely huge.  Homemaker. Yeah. Exactly, the homemaker. And it didn't give her a lot of options if she got tired of being the homemaker because she didn't have any money a lot of the time, she was barefoot and pregnant a lot of the time, birth control pill hadn't been invented, and women's flexibility has increased dramatically. Because if you've got both halves of a couple in the working world, at least a third of the time, the wife is out earning the guy. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Oftentimes the main breadwinner. Why is that, though? I mean, we've seen, in our lifetime, in our career time, we've seen enormous changes about the role of women. It wasn't only, you know, women's rights, it was more than that. It was a social change in the balance somehow. It's having an effect finally after all these years. Oh, it's having a huge effect. You know, it may have been that women were held down. It may have been that women have got a higher EQ than guys do. It may have all kinds of different factors involved. Women are now becoming better educated. Their earnings, in the last 20 years, women's earnings capacity grew 44%. Men's capacity grew 6%. You know, in this high-tech era, women are finding, are snagging more jobs that don't require heavy lifting, don't require manual labor, and major, major stuff, and they're taking charge. And then we look in Congress and we find there are more women in Congress than ever before. There's a really substantial number of women. This time around, for sure. Where at the State of the Union address, it was visible. I'm sure when you went to law school, which is even before I went to law school, you know, there were what? You know, a dozen women in a class in law school. My class, not that many. Yeah. And now over 50%. More than 50% of the women, the people getting higher degrees in business and law, doctors, they're women. Women are, they work harder, they're more serious, sir. This is going to change the relative, the relative earning ability. Well, what that does is that women are no longer dependent upon men economically. So that gives them a range of options that is pretty staggering. So when, you know, when I write in my book that two-thirds of all divorces, both in Hawaii and nationwide, are filed by women, you know, it's because women hit a breaking point where they're, you know, no longer all that thrilled with taking care of guys. They're exercising their independence. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And then the guys sometimes play into it by not doing enough chores around the house, by not, you know, by not being serious enough.  And you know, you and I are just now growing out of it.  But you know, at some point they start thinking about, hey, you know, I'm going to have kids and if I'm going to have kids, I want to have a responsible adult to help me raise them. And we got to have a roof over the head, which means my husband's got to have a job. He can't, you know, he can no longer just be zipping, you know, hanging out with the guys. He's got to have a serious job. And the criteria that women have start to get more serious. Sometimes guys don't measure up. Yeah. Well, you know, the old macho thing is out and a lot of men are carrying that around, even, you know, when it's really old hat. But let me ask you a global question, Brad. You know, you got the U.S., you're talking, it seems like you're focused on the U.S. on the cities, you know, the middle class, the professionals in the U.S. But let me give you Bolivia for a minute, or Romania, or Africa, or the Middle East. You know, they women have been put down for a long time and are still put down and are still put down. How'd you like to be the fourth wife of a Muslim? You know, exactly, exactly. So the question I put to you is that this is this is visible to the world. The phenomena that you're describing are visible to the world. And it's not that the people in these other continents and countries where women have been and are still being put down, don't know what you're saying. They know they can see it happening. Not only because they watch stink tech, either. It's all on their cell phone. They see what's happening. If you're looking for megatrends, you know, do you include the fact that this is going to have an effect on the social structure of Romania and Bolivia and Africa and the Middle East? Well, so far it's mainly America and the Western world. But it is, the ripple effect is going to be inevitable. You know, it's estimated that globally 38% of all men don't do any chores at all. I mean, in America, you know, they've done that. They've traced it down to where women are doing 102 minutes a day of chores and men are doing at least 48 minutes a day. I don't know who does these studies, but that's what I've got. You know, I've read an article in the paper, not too long ago about Japan, about how the, you know, Donelson at home, I mean, the man, right? You know, the term, right? The Donelson at home didn't do any chores. And the woman now was working and then coming home and doing chores. And there was a lot of resentment about that. So, at least in the U.S., we're maybe doing somewhere to a half to a third of the chores. So, you know, the house husband, whatever. But 38% globally men don't do any chores at all. Maybe take out the trash. I mean, that's, you know, that's bound to put a bur under the saddle of liberated women and women are getting increasingly liberated as we're witnessing. Okay, let's talk about the way that social trend affects itself, reveals itself within the marriage, assuming the marriage continues. Does it mean, I mean, like in the Chinese sense, a lot of Chinese men and women in families, the men, the man had his, has his finances. The woman has her finances. Never the twain will meet. You know, they both operate separate financial worlds. You think that that is going to happen in other places as well, where they make, you know, contributions. The woman makes greater contribution than before, but it's not a pooled, it's not pooled resource anymore. They operate individual financing, financial arrangements. You think that's going to happen? Well, it's certainly happening in the U.S. And most of my research has been in U.S. Oriental for the divorce of decency book. But yeah, it's bound to ripple around the world.  So maybe they can drive to a job. Maybe they can get a job. They can get their own paycheck.  But in Western Europe, women are absolutely starting to run the show. And the British have got a term called free males. They, they, they, they, that was a current coin, free of males. That's right. A number of women living alone between 25 and 40, 44 in Britain has doubled in the last two decades.  When I see, when I do a divorce, especially for an older, more mature woman, if I do it for a guy, first thing he's thinking about is, okay, where do I get my next wife? If I do it for a woman, it's like, I don't want to have another guy in my life to have to take care of me. Exactly, exactly. So let's, let's talk about, you know, want to continue that, maybe this is not in the order that you had in mind, but to marriage itself. Because this suggests that women are no longer tethered to their husbands. That's exactly right. And maybe something is changing with respect to, you know, the whole institution of marriage. Tell us what that is. Well, what it, what it is is, well, here, let me, can I read a couple of statistics? This is the modern Wahinis world and how things have changed for women compared to the Donna Reed days. 36% of women surveyed said they would not marry the same husbands again. 36%, that's over a third. Only 12% of married men admitted that they had picked the wrong wife. 51% of all American women are living single as of 2006 and 2008, and now it's got to be far more than that. You know, based on average wage calculations for services rendered, fatherly duties, valued at about $20,000, maternal labor is $60,000. Most of shocking statistic of all, 30% of American women who are now married do not intend to be with the men they're currently with five years from now. Oh, wow. And it's got to be higher than that. If they're admitting that, if 30% of them are admitting it in a survey, you can imagine how many of them are keeping it to themselves. Well, that's, that really is a shattering kind of set of statistics in the sense that we thought it was, you know, till death do we part. Not no more. That's, you know, the religious approach to it. And I don't think religion is all that important. We can talk about that too. But, you know, what strikes me is that this economic emancipation leads to the dissolution of the institution itself that they don't feel the need to be with someone who is, you know, tied up with them, that they can find a life on both sides. They can find a life without their spouse. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so you see signs of this happening. And a happier life. And you hit on something, actually, you're brighter than you look. You hit on something just as you went through. Marriage is essentially, was a religious institution. So as you have the decline of religion in America, you do have the decline of the marital institution. Instead, people are getting married later.  Now, guys aren't getting married until about 29. Women until about 27. So they're delaying marriage. Over 50% of the people in America now are cohabiting or living single, as opposed to being married. For the first time at the last census, the number of traditional American households married with children is below 50%. So you've got more people choosing to cohabit and or live alone without benefit of clergy, so to speak, back to the religion thing, than there are traditional married families. And then you've got a society that was, of course, built on the traditional marriage nuclear family. So where does that go? And then you've got another self-selecting aspect of this that college-educated people are far more likely to get married, earn more, be higher achievers, have a more stable financial structure than our high school dropouts who get married far less. They cohabit instead. They have kids out of wedlock, not as committed to the family unit. They earn more. So it's actually increasing this gap between the wealthy, educated married couples and the lesser educated high school, let's just drink beer and have a good time. That gap is getting wider. Education teaches you that stability is a better way. That's right. That you need to be stable for economic purposes, if nothing else. Married couples definitely out earn single people by a huge amount. There's strength in union. That's what it is. That's right. It's a work together and you have somebody committed to you and you pool your funds, you're more likely to have economic stability. What's troubling about this is that you see the institution he wrote in. They're andisha. The andisha include living together instead of getting married, never getting married. I mean, I know people who've been living together for 40 years or more. And they're very devoted, but they're not going to get married. I also see, I'm sure you've seen this expand logarithmically in your career, the number of people who have had multiple marriages, multiple divorces, and keep on doing it. What is the difference between that and dating one woman after another woman after another woman or vice versa? It just strikes me that we have andisha to indicate that the marital institution is on the way out. That's very clear. The actual, if I can just do it, and we may not get to all of them on this one, but the six trends that I've identified are the women's movement and the rise of the shi economy, the increase in cohabitation and the decrease in marriage, social media, and the internet, which raises the, and it explodes the opportunity cost. What do you mean, finding another marriage? Yeah, I mean, it used to be, if you felt, if I didn't marry my college sweetheart, I mean, never find a girl like her. And I better act now because I'll never meet anybody else. You know, you had, there were two things that used to be required for dating and mating, proximity and timing. You had to actually physically be there. I hope you guys are writing this down. This is very important. It's on the final exam. That's right. You had to physically meet somebody, proximity-wise. It used to be, maybe you met in bars or at other people's wedding receptions. That was a biggie. But you had to physically meet somebody. Now you can meet 10 people a day on the internet. And then the timing had to be right. You could always find somebody who would fit in your expectation. The other pillar, the twin pillar, proximity and timing. You could meet Miss Wright, but she was already married to somebody else. That didn't work. So you had to have both those things concurrently happening in order to form a stable in any kind of a relationship. Now the timing is, okay, I'll swipe left, or I forget, I've never swiped.  If she doesn't respond, then you just go to the next swipe. So the timing is like instant, and the proximity is basically worldwide. You can, anybody who's on any of these sites, you know, internationally. So you can basically, when you think what that does, the opportunity cost of giving up on any one relationship is far less, because there's another one right around the corner. Meanwhile, that translates into a series of shorter term, revolving relationships.  You can just revolve in and out of relationships almost instantly nowadays, without having to actually, you know, put in the time and energy and the good fortune to find the right one. Now you just find them instantly. We're going to revolve, too. We're going to revolve into a break. And when we finish with the break, we're going to be revolved right back again. That's Brad Coates. And we're talking about social megatrends of which he knows plenty. We'll be right back. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters, aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., aloha. I don't even know this because it's a religious question. Yeah. God only knows. Okay, we're live. We're back with Brad Coates, and we're talking about social megatrends, and we're really getting a tremendous fire hydrant of possibilities here, and we were talking about the undermining, the duration of the institution of marriage, at least in this country, and maybe other countries to follow as they see what happens here. So there were other factors, and I wanted to cover other factors with you. One factor would be sex. Sex, it seems to me that the whole opportunity of courtship and sex, the connection between sex and marriage, it's all changed. And therefore, that undermines marriage as a home for sex, if you will. Well, there's layers and layers of all that, obviously. Probably the most obvious one is pornography and the internet. I read somewhere, I think this is about, right, that there's more traffic on porn sites than there is on either Amazon or Facebook. Well, I think that's true. And it is what that does when you think about, I'm sure you've never been on a porn site. Never, never. No, you've heard a lot about them. People tell me.  What did you call them? Sex expectations. So the guy's expectation is, why isn't my 38, 48-year-old wife looking and acting and performing the maneuvers that this 18-year-old paid prostitutes are performing? And that is horrible.  That is irritating enough. Then to have the sex situation where you, you know, like I say, it's totally the expectation or totally off the charts. And then here's one that you might not have thought about. As you start to age out, both the genders, you know, biologically, God, he or she or whoever, made it this way, Darwin, you know, both people start to age out of their sexual prime at about the same time. Along comes Viagra.  And the gals are saying, hey, I thought we were done with this. I thought this was going to be our golden years. We're supposed to be, you know, taking cruises. They don't have a comparable drug, I think. Well, that's right. And the guy, and not only that, I don't have graphic you want to get. And you've probably never taken Viagra either because a guy like you doesn't need it. But if you were to take Viagra, it's like an instant erection and you're ready to roll. Whereas studies have shown that although guys can come and have an ejaculation and then have an orgasm within, you know, six minutes, women take 18 to 20 minutes in the best of time of foreplay to even be aroused for that. So now, and that's in the best of time.   What are you doing? And the next thing, you know, she's coming in to see the divorce lawyer and saying, hey, I could, I out earn this guy. I'm doing all the chores. I've had the kids. Women are serious about the maternal instinct. That's hardwired in them, speaking of Darwin. You know, the marriage for purpose of having a serious guy to help them raise the child and the maternal history to have children, women stay pretty serious about that. But then after they've had the kids and then you're looking at another four and plus we're all living longer. So now you almost need a different partner for each different stage of your life because, you know, for the next 40 years, you're going to have to put up with this clown and you don't need him anymore because the kids are already grown. So now you've got an even trickier situation. It was a longer life as far as the Wahinis are concerned. More possibilities, more chapters, more clowns. That's right. That's right. Okay, what about religion?    How does that affect the deterioration of the marital institution?  Civil unions had the effect of establishing that you didn't have to be married to participate in your partner's pension plan to have the financial rights that you otherwise have. All this was set up originally. The tax code, everything else was set up for married people to have an advantage because that was what society wanted to see. Married couples propagating. That's what religion was. America, the way it always used to it was. And now you've got a situation where you can get your partner's share of stuff without getting, without getting, and medical coverage and everything else without having to get married. So that has had the effect again of cutting against the need for traditional marriage. Yeah. Well, maybe traditional marriage is going to be replaced at least in part by gay marriage, right? It's happening. Or civil unions or something. Yeah, partnership, sure. Why do civil union when you can get married, right? Well, why get married when you can just live together? That's the other half of the story. That's the ultimate question, right? So where, I guess I would ask you, oh yeah, and religion, that's the last one. Religion is changing. And maybe it should after all these years. It's maybe becoming less influential on us, or in some cases it's becoming more influential but not in the same way. How does that affect the institution of marriage? Well, the argument has been made by lots of people, lots of smart sociologists that have said, hey, marriage is essentially a religious institution to begin with. We shouldn't be, we should, the government should have nothing to do with it. If people want to get married, that's fine. But don't be changing your property division laws or your tax laws or everything else based around what's essentially a religious right. And why are we going down that path? You're going to hear those drums getting louder.  Even before you get to the religious question, in living together and having a family unit that was reliable, that worked together, a little team that collaborated on the things necessary to help each of them in their family experience. And that, if you take away the institution of marriage with anything less, you lose that or at least you lose part of it. And so, my question to you is, how does that affect our society on a macro level? That's got to change. This country was built on the religious notion that the family was the core social unit. And now we're losing that as a primary, a core social unit. How does this affect us? Well, for centuries, the deal was that men had, the roles have gotten so blurred now. Men were masculine. They were the ones that fended off the saber-toothed tiger at the cave door. I think it's actually clan of the cave bear, but you're close. Anyway, the men were the hunters and the warriors and the women were the gatherers and the agriculture. And women raised the children and men did whatever guys do. A lot of times it was fighting and partying. Now that those roles have become blended, where anybody can just hit a button on a computer screen and shop off of Amazon.  This is all gender-neutral nowadays. Nowadays, women can fight in the fields and they can have the drone attack ISIS just as easily as the men can. They can go on the battlefield. They do. So that entire set of gender roles has been reversed. Ironically, what that has done, as women take more and more charge of their lives and charges of sight and everything else, it's taken the stress that men used to feel in business. And you know, honey, I got to come home from the office and have the three martini.  Now women have got those same stresses all day long and they don't want to then have to cater to the guys having had that. And there's statistics that have shown they've actually got what's called the happiness hierarchy. Four categories. The happiest guys are married men. The next happiest are single women. Third happiest are single men. Single men. And fourth happiest are married women. Married women are less happy than single men or single women and much less happy than married guys.  So what happens on the macro level? What happens to the country? If I withdraw this institution or I deteriorate it or change it, you know, what happens to the country? Do we lose something in the process? Do we lose, you know, the male aggressive element in business or in other activities? Do we lose the nurturing homemaker attitude, you know, in women? And does that have an effect on our society? Where are we going with this? Well, where we're going with it is a major shake-up in the societal roles. I mean, there's good parts of it. I mean, men are becoming much more nurturing of their children nowadays. I mean, I'm at the office, you take care of the kids. That's changed by a house husband taking care of the kids. Oftentimes, you know, and maybe 20% of all married relationships. And the woman's the higher earner and she's going out to work. So there's positives in that. But we've got these situations now where the roles are becoming so confused and the women are taking on an awful lot of stress. Economically, the social institution of a marriage has been estimated to be worth a happy marriage worth about $100,000 a year. That's what the economists will tell you. And you make much more money. You have a much more stable family. Nowadays, half of the kids in America, born to women under 30, are out of wedlock. So, you know, I'm not saying that's bad. You know, I don't want to sound like a show. Well, it depends on how they handle those kids out of wedlock. But if you've got revolving men coming in and out of a woman's life that's been shown that that adds about a 15% per partner emotional stressors for the kids. So we're raising whole generations of kids now without a traditional nuclear family, without maybe male role models at home a lot of the time because a lot of these women, especially in the poorer inner cities, are raising the kids alone and the guys are coming and going, being guys and flaky. And women are picking up a lot of the heavy lifting.  You know, it's not so much the generations that exist today. It's those kids. They're the future. And if they don't grow up in a home that says, Johnny, do your homework. And, you know, don't get in trouble. They won't do their homework and they will get in trouble. And all of a sudden we have a society of citizens that are that are getting in trouble. Well, and they're also problem. They're also growing up. I mean, you talk about the marriage, the dissolution of marriage being more and more common. These are kids who've grown up now watching their parents get divorced. So what are they supposed to, you know, isn't it more likely that they're going to just think, well, this is more natural.   I don't like that anymore. No, nobody cares. So they're more used to it. So they're going to probably perpetuate that behavior themselves. What do you do, Brad? I mean, I'm really interested in what kind of advice you would give to people who are, say, presently married, stay married, negotiate a solution, negotiate a middle ground, deal with the disparity in income. However, it's right or wrong. Deal with the need to do the household chores and take care of the kids. What kind of advice do you give? I guess what you would say from what you've said up to this point is it's better to stay married if you can, but you've got to negotiate an arrangement that works for both. Well, yeah, I mean, basically, given that it's women that are pulling the trigger most of the time, two thirds of the time, they're the ones that... See, guys will stay in even an unhappy marriage if, as long as they can sit in their lazy boy lounger and watch TV and somebody hands them a meal, that's about all a guy expects. Women have these heightened expectations for some crazy concept called communication, whatever the heck that is. And they want their guy to communicate with them. If you think about the way men are raised, men are raised to be competitive.  It's all career oriented. And guys, that whole thing has been about competing. For women, they've had the PTA, they've had their book clubs, they've had their sorority sisters, they said it's a much more female bond. This is why they're able to survive in their late 60s with just their female friends, whereas the guys have to immediately go find another wife to take care of. So what guys have got to do, and I've talked about this on my speeches on the cruise ships that I used to do, guys have got to learn to go from competing to connecting. They've got to, they have got to learn to communicate. This is what the women want. They're taking charge. We better learn to deal with it. You've got to be more like Alan Alda, you know, or whoever your sensitive male figure is, and less like that macho J. Fidel. I don't know. I mean, you've got to, guys have got to begin to realize that they're going to be the ones that have to go more than halfway towards keeping the marriages together. Do you worry that men will lose their aggressive edge, an edge they need to deal with in the world? Well, I mean, hashtag me too, man.  So, I mean, you know, it's not a question, it's not a question of if it's now. Yeah. Well, also, as you said, you can sublimate it and still express it and enjoy it. And your spouse can enjoy watching you express yourself by sublimation. Maybe that's a point of the future. If you look and see how, you know, our social structure is going to be, there'll be more opportunities for sublimation. Guys are going to have to get more in touch with their feminine side. I'm convinced about that. Yeah.  Yeah. What have we not covered? Expect to stay married. Well, what have we not covered? I think we covered everything on your, well, on your list. I don't know how much time we got, but there's a couple more. We'll take a couple of short ones. Gray divorces, baby boomers are getting divorced twice the rate of previous generations. And those are the people you thought were going to be stable, right? They're going to get to their 60s, their golden years, they're going to live out that happy trails together. And instead, they're getting divorced. 25% of our recent divorces involved people have been married for two decades or more. So you've got long marriages that are still breaking up due to elongated lifespans and again, due to further expectations, divorces for folks over 50 have doubled within the last 20 years. But it's different though. It's different. Divorce, gray divorce is different in the sense that you have other issues.  You don't have a spouse who will, you know, stand with you in difficulties around old age. And that may be exactly when you need a spouse.  So I wonder how that all works out. I mean, it may be that the people who are doing gray divorce, they think they're still 20. Well, because of the drugs, because of the world around them, because it's so easy. The elongated lifespans, everybody's trying to take, you know, fitness and take care of yourself into older age. I mean, none of us are admitting that we're aging, right? Pitfalls, what's your advice to people who consider divorce in their gray years? Well, it's hard to say. And again, I'm a lawyer. I'm not a philosopher.  And now that there's so many more options, that is becoming a situation where people are inclined to exercise them. I think if you can, if you can continue to meet each other halfway, and in the guy's case, more than halfway maybe, you know, and hold a marriage together, more power to you. I think there's a lot to be said for that. And it certainly, like I say, has been the bulwark of what America and Western culture was built on. But you know, you go to Scandinavia, nobody's getting married anymore.   And so this is... And they've done well with it. And they've done well with it. It hasn't undermined anything for them. They enjoy it. Their society is fine. Their economy is fine. That's right. So if I was going to say one thing, and sort of in conclusion, there's an author named Charles Martel who based upon all the factors that we've been talking about, where there, you know, increased educational attainment for women, labor force participation, rise in cohabitation, all these different... All these areas where now the marriages that were once associated... The benefits that were once associated with marriage are being curtailed and being replaced by other stuff. Now you've got a situation where this sociologist Charles Martel is he's predicting, and I got to get the dates right for you because I know you like specific statistics, he's predicting that if the current trend continues somewhere between 2028... That's 10 years from now. It's very specific. And 2034, the U.S. marriage rate will reach zero. Europe already has the lowest marriage rate on record. China, half a million fewer weddings every year than there were the preceding years. Are they living together? I don't know. I haven't lived with any Chinese yet. But the reality of it is that the marriage rate is dropping and all these, as soon as the culture gets more affluent, the birth rate goes down and the marriage rate goes down with it. And when it gets less affluent? Well, when it's... Reverse.  The wife had to stay home and take care of her own kids.  And the husband was out plowing the fields and you needed three other kids to help, you know, pick the apples off of the tree and can the peaches. You needed these big families and you needed them to all be working together as an integrated whole in the agrarian economy. In the industrial economy, the sky is the limit. Everybody goes whatever direction they want. I just want to add one point before we close and that is this. We are social animals. That's the operative word here, social. And we have needed, not because religion required it or the state required, we have needed to have the family unit for support because we're social animals. And if we are going to drop marriage or reduce the incident of marriage or somehow change the institution so it is not like it used to be, I think we still had, we're still social animals. And therefore we have to have friends. We have to have people we can talk to, people we can bounce off ideas. And the problem I see when you mix all that up together with the fact that we live on the internet, we live with machines, not people. We spend less time engaging one on one, you know, exchanging thoughts and feelings and telling our secrets. And, you know, that leaves us kind of in a vacuum. If we don't have a marriage and a close relationship through the marriage and we don't have, and we have more mechanical, electronic relationships, if you will, we've lost something. And that makes us more vulnerable. Comment? I think you're 100% correct.    It really is crazy. You're losing the human element and it's becoming more robotic. I mean, there's no question about it. It is going to be, you know, the men versus the machines before long. And that's nervous-making. That'll be a different life.  We have to watch this. You and me both. We have to revisit this as time goes on because other thoughts will occur to us. Well, keep having me on your show for interpersonal relationships. You can do that. Right. I needed the personal relationship, so do you. So let's do it. All right. Aloha. Thank you, Brad Cohen. Always good to see you. Great to have you here. Yeah. Aloha.


Hey everyone, I'm Adam Gardner the the session today is building progressive delivery and safety Into your applications With with feature flags, so I'm assuming because you're in this room. Most of you are app developers Not yeah, cool Whoo Like that energy nice All right, but who am I? I'm a dev rel I work in the dev rel team the developer relations team diner trace Getting some feedback now I'm also a CNCF and CD Foundation Ambassador so I've spent the last decade or so in the observability Space obviously being with with diner trace, but that encompasses a lot. It's it's a wide field so Quick show of hands. I know nervous How many of you have heard the term progressive delivery? Good good about 20% I would say yeah, maybe not that all right. So that that's important I mean because Different people have got different ideas different open source projects will talk about it in different ways the different vendors Cop that term to mean slightly different things. What do I mean for the for the purposes of this talk? Is any tactic technical procedure so any way? basically That enables a software system an application a microservice to be gradually enabled or disabled so if you have a way to Not go from version one a hundred percent to version two That's that's all I'm talking about with with progressive delivery any any strategy that that enables that to happen and really that is a corollary for control and precision because if you've got that You can control the rollout and the rollback and you've got that precision to target who you're rolling out to So how how do you do that? A lot of it? relies on duplication Basically, so you you duplicate things and then you figure out a way to point people to to this or or that effectively so Reconfiguring, you know even on VMs reconfiguring load balancers reconfiguring DNS, you know, this isn't cloud native especially We've got blue-green deployments where you spin up, you know Version a version B version one version two and you just send the traffic to the left or the right Canary deployments where you're saying well, you know, I'm on version one and I want to pick a subset of users that maybe they're in Australia where I'm from or maybe they have blue t-shirts on or whatever your criteria is and you only send You know the new version to that set of That set of users you obviously observe and you make sure that it's healthy and then you Increase the size of that cohort so over time obviously if you continue down that path Your version two becomes the primary version and you repeat the process Client metadata strategies are another common way So here I'm talking about Leveraging things on the client side and I don't just mean the browser. I mean any client So but things typically like header values Like the user agent so you might want to send Chrome users to a version and Firefox users to another version using cookies using geolocation and and pretty much any other aspect that you want that You know you can you can pick out and really Choose how you're targeting that that cohort of users And then you get more into the marketing type Ways of doing things so a B testing but also multi-variate testing so these days, you know You don't just have two variables You've got hundreds of different capabilities and Things and combinations and the marketing team love this because they're going to come to you and say well We're doing this new rollout this new campaign and actually We've got 10 versions of the page We've got a button over on the left a button on the right and then two more versions where the button has different Text and then we've got a page with no button and you not only have to code all of that But then ultimately it's got a got a run and it's you've got to get the statistics about Is it healthy? Is it working? Is it converting and so on and so forth? and Then we've got feature flags so all everything else on this page is You know you can do it might not be nice to do but you could do it with duplication and then kind of separately we've got feature flagging and Obviously lots more of lots more techniques So at first glance you might think well, it's it's this versus this It's it's the tooling aspect of using something like flagger or Argo rollouts and any other tooling that you care to pick or purchase and Then you've got feature flags and they're they're different and I need to pick a road and stick with it and You know, I'll hang my hat on that but actually it's not quite that simple because The tooling is great for big broad bold changes So think about changing the underlying container image the the version of The JVM the version of Python, you know something that is big and actually logically you can't run To in the same Container it doesn't make sense. So the tooling aspect is great for that because you've got fit not physical, but You get my point. You've got concrete duplicates Where you can really can compare in in the observability data the statistics Well, is a OB did it make any difference? Hopefully not. Hopefully it got quicker Who knows we'll see in the data Feature flags are a little bit different They have you can bolt on the tooling by the way So as app developers you can write your code just like you have And you just pass it to whoever runs it and they provide all of the tooling They provide the service measures and the ingress rules and you know the capability to send That data from A to B the feature flags you must develop in your application So what that allows is actually if you hide your new features behind those flags You can decouple your deployments The kind of act of getting that that thing running from the releases from actually You know having users use the thing Feature flags are great for small dynamic changes that you might want to make And they're very very good for looking at environmental conditions as we saw before Things about the user things about the client so there are Definite use cases for both and if one of the things I want you to take away from this talk is that it isn't a Versus it's an aunt So they they can and should coexist and they work best when you When you when you use them and leverage them together So going back to the tooling. This is how tooling in this case flagger This is how flagger works. So on the top there. You've got your primary. That's version one And then your let's say you're sending a hundred percent of your traffic to version one because that's the only thing running The tooling will then spin up The experimental version the version to the canary we call it and Then flagger or you or the DevOps people or the SREs will define the rules So you say 10% of my traffic goes to the canary. I'm gonna test it. It's healthy Okay, now I'm gonna shift 20% and so on and so forth And that's what that we all love Yammel who who doesn't love Yammel That's what flux looks like. So so you're saying well every minute we're gonna check The health and then we've got thresholds and weightings and basically you're trying to get to 100% so that's that's what You know the flux looks like and a similar thing with Argo where we're saying okay each step We're gonna progressively roll out more and more traffic and actually we're gonna wait certain duration So the first one because there's no parameters there That's a manual weight someone actually has to go in and click go But then after that we wait 10 minutes We progress to 60% of the split 60% of our traffic. We wait 10 hours and these are obviously arbitrary and then up to 80 we wait an hour and at any point if your metrics Signal that that the canary the new version is unhealthy. You can trigger the rollback feature flags though just in case you're not You know fully across what feature flags are in the use cases that they can really target I've seen them used for feature toggles. Obviously as we're talking about testing and production So if you can roll out whatever you like as an app developer if you can write your stuff behind a flag and Say to people don't worry.  I've seen it used for Mitigating temporarily DNS Sorry DDoS attacks, so we detect we flick the flag and all of a sudden you're being served from the CDN Rather than the life the life page It's not the fix of course, but it's buying buying your company some breathing breathing room user targeting we've talked about Security mitigations, so if you're using a library and all of a sudden, you know next week There's a vulnerability that appears in the world if you can have a feature flag to toggle that functionality off or Fall back to a different way of doing that thing You're actually making your app more secure because the first thing you're going to be asked is Are we exposed? Yes How often how quickly can we mitigate this? Well instantly just toggle toggle the flag off. I don't know if you've heard But large language models and chart APT is pretty big news these days And I don't think you're expecting to get through this conference without hearing about it So the other there you go. I get the bingo if you haven't already heard this morning Structured content for LLM So so they like content in a certain way so that they can you know crunch it and do what they do which no one understands but You can serve the normal good-looking content to humans and then the other content the stripped-down version to the bots or Google bot or Chat GBT Let's get some code. So this is what a feature flag looks like you typically start your journey building something in-house This very simple is a get request on the home page We're getting the flag value called foo and then we're using that. So it's the most basic feature flag you can have It's effectively a boolean the problem here though is that get flag value because that code there is You have had to write that and that is the integration code that you're reaching out to your flag system Whether you've built it or bought it So what you've actually done is you tightly coupled Shiver we don't like that you've tightly coupled your application to whatever the flag Back-end you you you're using in-house or paid or an open source solution So how do you solve that? Well? We? Rip that code out effectively. It's the same code But we wrap it in an interface. We wrap it in an open feature provider Basically, it's the same code, but open feature is a standard. It's it's Yeah, it's a standard that has a very well-defined interface and So your connection code goes into an open feature provider pretty much the same code But then you can just call get flag value So what that actually looks like is you say Get me an open feature API set the provider to Let's say you've built something in-house That's that you would create the provider and that would be you setting that provider and then as an app developer You do that you say open feature client get me a boolean get me a string get me a You know integer whatever it is you don't care day to day where that's coming from because there is a layer effectively in the middle and So what you've really done is you've moved the padlock that the integration back in the layer to the provider So now your app is completely decoupled from the back end provider at dinotrace for example because We're assuming that everything's nice and you've got one feature flag system But let's be honest. You don't these things grow independently and I think we've got Six or seven different feature flag providers and vendors at dinotrace, so Hence we needed open feature So the next question probably is well who creates or maintains these providers? Obviously if something you've developed in-house, it's you if it's open source then the open source community the project Will actually create that provider so you don't even need to care how you're connecting to the back end you just say Set the provider if it's a paid vendor, of course And they are here at kubecon They will write the provider demo time enough slides.  No good joke. Yep. I will do increase the form So what you're looking at is a very very basic demo It's the open telemetry demo the dice roller So if you want to instrument things with open telemetry you go on their website and they've got this demo application that Basically creates a number from one to six I've instrumented it to send the open telemetry traces to Jaeger and I've also Feature flagged this so we can see the impact that the feature flags can have so There we are. We're running everything's nice and quick to regenerate my my numbers and if I go into Jaeger we can see We have an open telemetry trace of the the action So looking at the the details that the span attributes on the trace We can see the feature flag provider and I'm using an open source provider called flag D It's a you can run it in various ways. Cuban is operator a standalone Linux binary I think they've even working on in-process evaluations now, but We have our feature flag key called slow your roll and the value the variant is false at the moment So there I'm saying I don't want to slow this down So it's fast. It's 74 microseconds So now let's look at the flag definition Big enough. No, it wasn't like this Okay, so this flag is called slow your roll as we've seen from the trace It's got two possible variants on and off as I say this is the most basic version And the default variant so what everyone is getting right now is off So now if I just turn that to on You'll notice we get the spinner And it's slow. It does work, but it's slow going back into Jaeger Now we've got a trace that's two seconds long and again drilling into that We can see the slow your roll flag is true So the real benefit to feature flags here is that I didn't need to restart anything redeploy anything it just happened at runtime because flag D is watching that file that source of truth and affecting my application at runtime So that's what I mean if you have a security issue You can just toggle something and then and then it just works kind of Let's make this a little bit more realistic and a little bit more advanced though So flag D and most feature flag vendors give The option of targeting so I'm going to reconfigure this flag or redefine I should say you can find the right tab and What's happening now is it's still slow for me? But if chat GPT Came on this website and hit it it would be fast for chat GPT Why well because of the feature flag definition so very similar we've got The same flag it's still enabled it's still got two possible variants and the default variant is on this time So by default the website will be slow But we've also got a targeting rule Now targeting rules all of the feature flag vendors will will do this But this is how flag D Implement and it's JSON logic. So what I'm saying here is well if the user agent that I pass Contains GPT bot which is part of chat GPT's user agent then It's off Otherwise it's on of course So what you've done there is you've taken some of the logic that you would need to build in your code and Put it outside. So now actually as an app developer That's one less thing for you to worry about because if if the dev ops of the SREs need to redefine anything They can do that as JSON logic You've you've shipped your you've done your job, you know, it's up to them to decide who gets what versions The question then becomes well, how how did we get all of this stuff and how do we pass this contextual information? Am I only limited to user agent? Why why user agent? Well? No, actually, so if I show you the code So we start off by setting the provider which by now you'll know is flag D I'm running flag D is a as a binary so I'm passing it local host on a on a port That's the only time I need to care about where my flags are coming from then in the actual code. I can say Here's a new evaluation context and I'm gonna pass the user agent and I'm gonna grab that from the request that comes in and Then when I evaluate the Boolean or I ask open feature for Boolean I Ask it for the key the slow your roll and I pass it the evaluation context that I've just built and I just shove that off to Flag D and flag D can then do whatever it likes With the evaluation context. So this is the glue. This is how you get user or front-end specific things into your back end So what if you wanted to change to a paid for vendor now or the only bit you need to change Are these three lines where you set the provider? And you you connect to a different back end provider Because everything else is handled by open feature and because it is that standard The vendors and the open source projects are agreeing To to to give us back The data in the right format and there we are Uh any Do we have time for questions? Nope, I've waffled on enough. Well, thank you very much. Come grab me. Um, the open feature booth Will uh, we'll be there We're an open feature on the cncs slack channel and openfeature.dev very very quickly. I've got four seconds left The two the tool tooling and flags are complementary You can pick both Open feature is future proof. So by doing that and by putting open feature in the middle You're saving yourself work in the future the wheel exists Don't go and rewrite the feature flag engine use an open source project buy a vendor or use flag d to get started As you've seen the observability is essential because if you can't tell why one thing's slow and one thing's fast you're kind of lost and also, you know Ask the vendors about this they provide the the open feature providers So so ask them if they have a provider in in the language that you code in Thank you very much for your time


It's st. Patrick's Day my Hi, I'm Sam McKinnon with Cal TV Entertainment and today I'm here on Sproul asking students if they're well prepared for my favorite holiday st. Patrick's Day. All right. Hi What are your names? Lindsay and Julie. All right, and what's your favorite holiday? Halloween Fourth of July. Point Christmas. I mean, I can't win. St. Patrick's Day. Uh, between maybe Halloween and uh, and Christmas So what are your plans this weekend for st. Patrick's Day? I'm not sure. I don't really know. Do you not care? Do you not see a leprechaun standing right in front of you? Nothing. Are you kidding? I'm literally a leprechaun.  Study. Call my parents. Probably. Probably like paint my body green entirely. Probably hang your own spread. How old are you? 18. What about you? I want to take naps. In you? I'm going to watch Netflix. Very non-fessive group. At the end of your hypothetical rainbow, besides potatoes, what would be there? The end of one piece. The end of one piece. Okay. What would be there with like a million dollars? A global carbon tax? All AIDS. Very studious. I like it. Cal loves you. Love. And finally, what is your opinion on corned beef and cabbage? Best st. Patrick's Day food. Thanks for watching. I'm Sam from CalTV Entertainment and I hope that you guys are now all ready for st. Patrick's Day. Why aren't you wearing green today, sir? It's st. Patrick's Day. You don't know. This is the best holiday ever invented. Oh my God, what are these people doing?


My name is Matt Hicks and I'm vice president software engineering at Red Hat that means I get to sit in the process of building our products and also working with customers on how they use them and it is a Fantastic place to get to be in the middle of that of not just I'm seeing things built but really seeing how we can bring value to our customers and Work with them to bring their innovation back into our products and into the open-source communities It's a really interesting time right now between development and infrastructure and we're we're focusing a lot on development because we see this opportunity to make Developers just more effective than they ever have been before and it's not just in writing The line of code or their ID tools But really making them effective from the first line of code they write all the way to their production deployment and that's that unique combination of both the development tools Combined with a lot of the infrastructure experience we have and we think it's really going to change the market Containers are really central to this change you hear a lot about the efficiency that containers bring to production And and I think that's great then encapsulate workloads really well and they provide a lot of operational efficiency But the power of taking something like Eclipse che and in a single click Mimicking your production environment in a hosted IDE. It is amazing on the development side I spent several years in IT and one of our biggest challenges was getting those development environments to mimic prod and Containers is this glue technology that can connect the development efficiencies with your production efficiencies And I think that will really change how we do work in this field Micro services, I think you're seeing this Resurgence in it because you have a combination of technologies that can make it real to be honest We've talked about this pattern for a long time And one of the challenges was we had the development patterns We didn't have the infrastructure to support it and now you're seeing the infrastructure capabilities with things like containers You're seeing the software stack whether it's circuit breaker patterns and the monitoring and then you're Seeing that development pattern realized and I think that's created just a lot of the excitement around It's a great way to build applications and now it is something that isn't just in theory We can actually take this to production and make real act like real applications real mission critical workloads on it It is a great time to be a developer these days But one of the challenges that comes with that is the rate of change in technology It is relentless right now, and I think that can be overwhelming for people where they want to use this technology They know it can be impactful But they don't have the time to learn it all well enough to really use it to their advantage and Our response at Red Hat is finding that balance of we obviously know the technology Well, we package the technology and we ship it but we're focused on how do we bring that to developers in a way Where they can start using it without having to understand every detail of how it works and from our developer studio To introducing new IDs and new language services Our goal is to find that developer that loves the new technology and get them started in 30 seconds Where they don't have to know all the aspects, but they can learn it as they have time to really let them utilize it from day one