In this video, John and I will be breaking down a massive opportunity in a recent IPO, but before doing that, a quick reminder that all the best tools for day trading will be linked down in the description. Don't forget to check that out. Let's get right in. You can see the price action from Thursday to Friday. It's 30 to 75. But my miss was the Thursday trade. For those who don't know, this DXYZ is a new ETF that just went public, say three or four days prior. It's a really interesting ETF in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's going to end up being a fraud or not, but it's an ETF that came public that's invested in private companies. And Alex can put the link below to the ETF so you can check out the prospectus. But 35% of the holdings is SpaceX. So I think it's become a kind of de facto play for people or a memified play for people for SpaceX. And if you look at the prospectus, it actually has a lot of really cool private companies in it, Discord, Plaid, Stripe, big companies, big tech companies that people have all heard of that are a lot of people are waiting to go IPO, but just haven't. So I think that this is moving so much because of that. I wasn't even aware of that ETF. I don't even think a lot of, maybe I'm just lost and I just haven't seen it, but I was, I saw it a bit when I look at charts, but I didn't know it was an ETF. I thought it was just a recent IPO or something like that. That's pretty unusual type of ticker. When I look at the destiny XYZ tech, the day that it came public, I was chatting with a couple other people and the website was way more sketchy than it is today because they didn't have the prospectus, they didn't have any of their SEC filings on there. No one could really figure out what the NAV value was and you can see it opened up at 10-ish. It made a crazy move on halts because it's the first day of trading and it traded back down to 10. But if you look at this, so the high of that candle though right there is 32, right? 32 exactly. So you let it trade for a couple of days and then my trade was on Thursday. And then a pre-market again on that Thursday. It goes up to the 32 area and it comes back down. So I was watching it here in that 30 area and there was a nice clean seller there at 30 and it was just getting tighter and tighter and tighter and bids are stepping up. I was looking to buy through 30, thinking and knowing that 32 was the next kind of catalyst for clean air where more buyers might come in, anyone who was short might look to cover. And my order just sat there and it didn't fell. And so I just left it there thinking that I was risking a dollar. Just because it was a little spreadier, I didn't really want to risk the candles. So I was kind of incorporating the spreads and the whippiness watching it trade. So I was kind of thinking that I was sizing it so that I was risking a dollar because I wanted to hold it for that possible bigger move. And I just didn't get filled. And then as you can see, it stops at 32. You get a really nice two-minute pause and then you're off to the races for that next move to 38. On this candle, you wouldn't stop out. I mean, it probably happened so fast, right? Just because, you know, and I was watching it and I was talking to some people who were able to get into that trade and there were some bids at 30. I wouldn't have stopped out just because that's the flicker that we've spoken about. I used to always stop out, right? Oh my gosh, it's flickering down. I need to protect those unrealized gains because they're, you know, mine, right? And that's a very ego. That's all about ego, right? Not ego, per se, like how most people would think of it. But you're protecting your ego because you think that you have two dollars of unrealized gains as it starts to flash down. You're like, oh my gosh, what's going on? I need to protect those two dollars of unrealized gains or a dollar or 50 cents at this point. But now, as we spoke about on our prior video, I like to keep it systematized, right? Just put my stop at break even, especially if I've sold some. So, you know, in this case, if I had it, I would have definitely sold a little bit into 32. And then I just would have put the rest, the stop at the rest at break even, you know, that's the two R cell put a stop at break even and then see what happens. And I probably would have been swearing, right? If I was stopped out and that happened. But you know, more often than not, right, the stops hold. It's just an emotional flicker to get people to make bad decisions, basically, right? It comes very, very, very close to your stop. So often what I probably mistake is when I see that it's so close to my stop, I just cancel my stop and I get out manually of the position. I'm telling you, I've done the same thing so many times in my career where emotionally, you think I just had two dollars of unrealized gains. I want to lock in the last 25 cents, right? But at that point, at that point, so even if you, you know, let's just use my number. So you had 100 shares and you were 200 dollars in the money. And now you're like, well, I could have sold for $200, but I didn't. And now I'm going to sell for $25 because I don't want to take a loss, right? That's the mentality. But if, you know, I had a lot of like a long, hard conversation looking at the mirror at myself, basically, like what's the point of locking in $25? At that point, why not just stop at a break even, right? Like what the $25 isn't going to change my, the $25 or the 25 cent gain is not going to change my day or my week or my month. But, you know, and I'm acting emotionally because it was up $2, right? If I wanted to sell up $2, I would have done so, right? And that's, you know, we're just only thinking in the moment of what we're seeing and what we're reacting to when you're watching that those flickers on the level two, basically, right? And I basically had to remind myself and drive at home that if I wanted to sell up $2, I would have done so, right? But I was looking for more. And that is what really helped me kind of ignore the little flickers down to 3050 or 3075 or 3025 or even 3001. But, you know, I've seen it where we've seen this happen where the original stop holds and then it eventually makes that move higher, right? More often than not, it does. More often than not. And, you know, just like anything, it's not, nothing's 100% certainty in the stock market, right? It's all just probabilities in what you see. But when you get these strong types of moves, they do tend to move, continue to move in your favor and the stop does hold. And whatever happens in the middle is just our own emotional, you know, doing our reaction to. By the way, if you're getting value from this video, don't forget to like and subscribe. I also did link all the best tools for day trading in the description. Don't forget to check that out. Let's get back in. Using a trailing sub, would you have trailed it with like a five minute or is there a way you would have exited that trade if you would have got that filled? And how pissed were you that you missed that trade?  It was just frustrating because this was an entry where, you know, you could see a clear seller at 30 and watching the level two and watching the Prince, you could see that it was getting taken. People were buying, people were buying it.  And I just wasn't. And I just, I hesitated. I hesitated for a second and I didn't push another buy button to try to get in because I wasn't sure if it was just going to be a delayed fill, right? I don't know if it was just the route I used. But it just, you know, I know I was kind of just shell shocked. I was kind of waiting. I was like, Oh, is it going to show up on my screen?  I know that feeling. Yeah. So, but yeah, I probably would just would have, I would have trailed just on the way up. You know, and this is one of those cases where I would have trailed on the way up or I would have tried to sell pieces on the way up. And then, then instead of using candle trailing, just because it's not as clear, right? So the differences is that compared to like your ACV long from another video, if you look at that 11 o'clock five minute candle, yep, that one right there. No, there's a very big bottoming link, right? So it comes close to that 32 breakout and then kind of closes at highs. And if you're watching this trade, you know, there were times when it had 50 to 60 cent spreads. So that's people just kind of hitting the spreads. So I would probably try to sell on the way up, say, and try to space it out, knowing that I had a belief that this could run to 40, right? Or 50. And, and that's only just because of what I just mentioned, right? SpaceX, kind of the only way to play this, it's new. It has a lower float. And it has has names that people are interested in that are all private, like Discord, Plaid, Stripe, SpaceX, and, you know, amongst others. So my initial thinking was for this, this could go to 40. So I would try to sell on the way up and hold that last piece for for 40 area. You know, and I probably would have sold that first spike to 40 that red candle, like, no, yeah, one more. Yeah. And when it doesn't touch 40, I would try, you know, I probably said that last piece then.


And welcome to the creative life, a creative collaborative production between Austin American Creativity Association and Think Tech Hawaii. So today we're going to be talking about innovation and improvisation. And in a few minutes, in a minute or so, I'll be introducing you to our guest. And we'll see what we could do today in terms of discussing creative problem solving and improvisation. And as our guests will tell us how we mash these together and move forward with great creative leadership. So our guest for today is Doug Stevenson. And Doug comes to us from Chicago, Illinois. And Doug has a very interesting background, and we're glad to have him with us today. So Doug has been have has 30 years of experience in marketing, design and working with creative teams for many companies that we're quite familiar with, including Doors. So I don't I don't know if you had samples from Doors, but it also has formal CPS training, and thousands of hours of design, facilitation and ideation. And he also has a podcast that he does with his colleague and friend, Greg Frally, and where they put together innovation and improvisation. And they coined a little cutesy term, innovation. So with that, Doug, I think we'll also share with our viewers that you also have a background in comedy. So we'll be counting on you to be quite funny. And you were part of the second city. And for our viewers that are not in the United States mainland, they may not be familiar with the second city. So perhaps you could tell us just a we could start out by just sharing a little bit of your brief experience, not your brief experience, but a brief summary of working with the second city and some of the people that you worked with. So with that, Doug Stevens and welcome to the creative life. And it is my pleasure. And I'm excited to be with you today. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. With regard to the second city, I mean, it's the still the mecca of improvisational performance. And it all began at one of Chicago's fabled institutions, the University of Chicago, where a group of kids got together and they included Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Ed Asner and Paul Sills and, you know, many others you'd recognize. And then they formed this thing called the Compass Players and that transformed into the second city, which was kind of the only show in town, the greatest show on earth for many years. And since then, there have been many imitators and offshoots of that. But second city is the is is an institution that's been around for quite some time. And it's sort of the citadel of improvisation in the world. Because I understand that you worked with a number of people that we would be familiar, at least with their name and probably have seen their performances on various media sources such as Paul Sills, who's amassing. Oh, you studied with those. But you would work to the second city with Steve Carell and Bonnie Hunt. Well, yeah. And just to be clear, while I was hanging around second city for four, five, six years, I really launched into a semi career in improvisation, because I was working at the Players Workshop of Second City with Josephine Forsberg, who was an apprentice to Viola Spolen, kind of the the grand dame of improvisation. And Joe Forsberg was one of the the second generation troop members of the compass players in second city. And she had her own school of of improvisation. And boy, I tell you what, if you listen to a tape of Viola doing her classes and Josephine Forsberg, you might not tell the difference. So she was she was key in my development. And so I what propelled me into this whole thing was I was taking classes with Joe and I on a lark did an audition for second city children's theater. And I had never been an actor before. This was my first improv class. And I never auditioned for anything. And I went there and I got the lead in this play. And and they said to me, well, Doug, we see you're not enrolled presently. And in order to be in this play, it sort of me to be enrolled. So I that's how I got more committed. And yes, I work with people like people who worked in second city. I did a number of my friends, including Bonnie and my friend, John, who was in the cast with Steve Carell, and my friends Joe List and Kevin Crowley. They all performed on the main stage of second city. So back in the day, I was older than these guys by about four or five years. So I actually had a home and a mortgage. So I couldn't I couldn't really lead the vagabond life of being on tour with second city at the paltry compensation level that they were at. But I would go on Saturday sometimes and perform with my friends in the improv set, which they did after the show after the late show on Saturday. And so yes, my last appearance at second city was with my friends, Kevin and John. And I think Joe and Steve Carell was in the cast and was very complimentary to me. I think he was just really being nice. Well, I'm pleased to have the very serious and sophisticated member of second city. And that would be you, Doug, I'm sure. So today we're going to talk a little bit about innovation and improvisation. And we'll start off by asking you to talk a little bit about your experience with creativity and innovation. And that would be for us to talk a little bit about creative problem solving. Right. I'll get to that in a second. First of all, I just think I should emphasize that creativity is vitally important at the Creative Education Foundation that hosts the SIPC, the annual conference on creativity. The philosophy is basically that creativity is as fundamental as the three Rs. And everyone, in fact, even more fundamental, that we all should learn how to solve problems more effectively. Anyway, as an early, because a young child, I had an aptitude for art. But beyond that, I didn't get much encouragement. And there are these studies that say that, oh, when you pull kindergartners, 95% of them raise their hands, right? When you say, who's creative? And by the time they're 18, about 2% of the kids raise their hand. Go ahead. I said that's very true. Which could lead me to the next observation that might get us into CPS. And that is one of the parallels I drew between creative problem solving and improvisation was that sort of the figureheads of both disciplines, Biola Spohlen and Improv and Sid Parnes in CPS had similar philosophies. And I'll share them with you. One of Biola's quotes is, born knowing everything, and then you go to school. And so that gets in line with the belief that somehow our institutions educationally could have drum our creativity out of our kids. And I had the privilege in 2006 of interviewing Sid Parnes personally. And he reminisced for two and a half hours. And one of the things he said is he delivered a summer camp for kids in creativity. And at the end of it, he got misty eyed with this. He said, one of the kids said to him, you know, I figured you out.  It was a great moment. And I guess the point here is that we have so many blind spots going through our development in traditional society. And what we need to cultivate with respect to creativity is the same kind of open-mindedness and playfulness we had as children. Yeah. And I think when we think about creativity, we realize that you can't be creative about nothing. And one of the reasons that we turn to some of these models, and you and I have a favorite, and that's what we're here to talk about today, you have to be creative about something. And ultimately, as you're looking for that something more often than not, that something is a problem. And that's the connection for us in dealing with creative problem solving. And the reason it is called creative problem solving. So with that in mind, how did you get, let me just share, I think we both have the same feeling that we feel that the creative problem solving institute model was like changing for both of us in different ways. And many of the people, if I think back to my first experience, when people would come back from the summer institute, I would ask them what it was about. And no one could really tell me, all they could say it was if they just got an aura about them and just said, you have to experience it to know what it was. So I think for those of us who have grown in creativity and stuck with it and played around with it some more as your term talking about mashing up creative problem solving and improv, tell us a little bit about that mash. Well, I will say this though too. To kind of as a billboard, I would say to your audience, if you have any doubts or reticence or if any, or especially if you have any appetite and curiosity for this, take a course in creativity, take a take one improv class. It's been proven that if you do just one of those things, your life will change, believe me, and for the better. I think the question was about CPS and how I got there. A little bit about that, but really how the two why why you've chosen to blend them and be one of them. Oh, okay. Well, that sort of so how I got to to the SIPC and CEF and creativity is for the number of years of my life people. I was kind of a late bloomer. I didn't realize I had creative aptitude. I was at Jock and high school and I used to use my head as a blunt instrument. And I, you know, I could be funny around the edges and I could be goofy, but you know, I never really took myself seriously as a creative person. And I got involved in my career first in advertising at Leo Burnett, and then in in three dimensional design and experiences at the exhibit group, Guildsboro, which is was in the design exhibit museum event space.  And this was at the design firm. And we were going through some corporate turmoil at the time at one time. And I closed my door. I was always an open door kind of guy, but it seemed like nothing but bad news was coming through the door for a while there, pink memos and stuff. And when that happened, an interesting thing occurred. It seemed like every five minutes, there was a knock at my door and someone came into my office and said, Doug, we need some creative ideas, you got any? And about 10 or 15 sessions in, I thought to myself, you know, I'm in the wrong business. I should be selling creativity. And then I explored, explored, explored. I found my way to SIPC and CEF. And there I learned the fundamentals of creative problem solving. And my past caught up to me.  And, and some of them have begun to employ improvisation in their creative problem solving practices. And they encouraged me to do the same. So then I realized that there were astonishing parallels between CPS and improvisation. Am I going in the right direction here? So, for example, you know, in creative problem solving is described two kind of distinct phases, right? A divergent phase and a convergent phase. And when you, if you look at divergence, and it's basically for the CPS model, but there's analogs in improv. And that is like CPS says the first premises defer judgment. Well, an improvisation that says, accept whatever initiation your partner gives you. So you don't judge, you just go with it. And CPS says, build on ideas.  And CPS says, come up with wild ideas. And in improvisation, you go, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's heighten and explore that. Let's take that to the max. And CPS says, go for quantity of ideas. And in improvisation, it's like and and and and and and that's what builds a scene to it. It's climax. So incredible parallels there. And then in the convergence of it, which is a little bit more vague, but CPS says, we'll be deliberate. So there's a deliberate aspect to that unmindfulness around process. And then even improvisation has rules that you try not to violate. You don't deny something, for example, you don't negate. You don't, you know, there are rules around improv as free and free form as it is. And in the convergence process of CPS, you're always mindful of your objectives. And in improvisation, you want to make a good coherent scene. And one of the things you do is you make sure that you make your partner or your other players look good. In CPS, you always want to improve on ideas and improvisation. You want to expand and heighten. You want to say, oh, yeah, Marsha landed on my front lawn yesterday. And oh, man, that spaceship was like amazing. And I think they had cable TV or something. Anyway, you just kind of go, you just keep going. CPS, you're affirmative. You're always talking positive pluses before. Judgment's not in the process until the very end of the conversion process. And in improv, you're always looking for agreement. And in CPS, they say, you know, considered novelty. One of my favorite exercises in CPS is the get fired idea. Because if people are having a problem getting to consider novelty, and I've done this with great results all the time, I just say, okay, think of the absolute worst ideas you can, the ones that want to get you fired. And amazing what people come up with. You go, wait a minute. If you twist that a little bit, that just might work. One thing that comes to mind is the band, The Grateful Dead, allowed people to tape their music and give it away for free. That's counterintuitive. But it built a franchise and a marketing behemoth that persists to this day. It sustained itself. I'd like to remind our viewers that so often in organizations, there are some mistakes that are made in identifying a choice for a way to proceed.  And it's assumed by the person that is in the position of authority that they're taking them through the creative process, whereas brainstorming is just one step of the creative process. And I think both of us would agree that it's important that we select a model for problem solving. And for me personally, not to put in my bias here, but I think for many people that are watching, they would agree that the magic of the creative problem solving model coming out of the fathering of Sid Parnes and some other leaders at that time and coming out from actually a business model too, is the magic is that you're constantly going from the critical to the creative. So you're always in its structure to bring you back. You're going free flowing, you're going wild. As you pointed out, you're going crazy with ideas. But then you're going to pull back with some activities that discipline you to move forward. And then it keeps going in that manner. Wouldn't you agree? Well, absolutely. And the other critical piece, for first of all, brainstorming, the way the model, the CPS model looks now is clarification, ideation, development, implementation. And brainstorming is but one aspect of it would probably be defined as the ideation stage. And this is one of the things you see in these articles that are critical of brainstorming. And you hear in common vernacular, oh, well, that was a waste of time. Yeah, we had a lot of ideas, but nothing happened.  And then you have a lot of ideas around it. And then you refine the ideas. But the last step is implementation, an action plan that gets implemented. And that's the key piece is often missing and why brainstorming is often miscast as a kind of a frivolous exercise. And it's not. How do we apply what we do know about models and the models of our choice? How do we apply what we've learned via these two disciplines and the disciplines being creative problem solving and improv? Well, what we found out is that people caught up to me and they outed me and they realized I had an improvisational background and truth be known, a lot of creative facilitators had done some training and improvisation. And what was typically done in their in their sessions was in between the phases of CPS, they would do these warm up exercises featuring improvisation to get people kind of loose and bonding and all this stuff. All good. But one of the things we realized is, wait a minute, these are parallel processes. And if you fuse them, they might even become more robust and dynamic. So we created the concept of innovation, a melding of innovation and improvisation, where we would actually take improv games and CPS tools and fuse them together. So for one example is there's a game in improv where you read from a book randomly or you just read a line from a book and then you improvise off of that. What we would do is we would take a post-it note from an ideation session and introduce that as a means of continuing the dialogue or we would do this thing called story throw or direct a story where five or six players in improv would be up on stage. There'd be a director and each of the people would represent a different POV like movie genres or angry, sad, whatever. Well, the same thing can be applied to stakeholders in a corporation or organization. It could be research and development and manufacturing and marketing or whatever or it could be customers, loyal customers, customers who aren't so loyal, customers who have walked away and you could direct a story. One of the wonderful things about improvisation is that it's really CPS in flow when Alex Osborn developed his concepts that are articulated in the Platt imagination. He was seeking to find out what were the critical elements of creativity so that he could enhance the performance of his creative people but also take these same fundamental skills to people who weren't necessarily naturally in that mode, creative. In my analysis, then CPS is sort of like a outline, a diagram of what the process looks like. It's the skeletal structure. Improvisation is that same model in flow. When you meld the two, you get the discipline of the structure but you also get the fluency and the kind of intuitive discovery of improvisation. People come up with things in an improvisational mode that they never might have said that in a session. For example, if there was a management problem, they might be reluctant to say on a post-it note, there is a management problem. But if you kind of recreate the dynamics of the organization which we've done and you assign people roles like you're the boss, you're this manager, this manager, and with the facilitation of the facilitators, the guides on the side, amazing things come out of people's mouths. They kind of say the truth without the judgment around it. I think I said to you the other day, improvisation is sort of like the WD-40 of creator process. It just increases the wheels and makes it more natural and organic and leads to greater discovery faster. I can see how that could happen. I can also see how there are people, some people might be by pure nature shy or not wanting to, reluctant to participate in anything that reeks of improvisation. How do you deal with those folks? Well, here's the amazing thing. Well, first of all, for most people, let's be honest, to go into a room and do just CPS, to go through that process is a step out of their comfort zone. I'm sorry? I probably, yes. But it's amazing if you have two facilitators in the room who are giving them security and create a safe place for this. It is amazing. We've done this with novices who performed improvisation like they were pros because they were just going to a natural place of intuition and instinctive behaviors and recreating how things were without inhibition. I'm not saying that there's a magic wand here that in all cases that this happens, but it happens with surprising regularity. You mentioned something to me about agility shifting. Could you talk a little bit about that? I won't pretend to be an expert, but one of my early mentors who you should meet is a woman by the name of Pamela Meyer who's here in Chicago. I work with her at DePaul where she used it. I believe she still does teach. She's since gone on to do a PhD and her third book is coming out. Anyway, her whole approach to creativity was improvisationally based. Her PhD was in organizational improvisation. I didn't know such a thing existed. The early work on this was around, they studied jazz musicians and how they improvised in their playing and their work and then selected paradigms and structures from that and applied it to organizations. She has her PhD in that. One of the challenges of going toward organization and giving them creative skills is typically, and you probably know this, Darlene, you go in, you do a three-day session, you do a six-week project or whatever, and it's all well and good. Even people are enthusiastic about it, but after that is done and the report is written, they revert to their old behaviors. One of the wish-fors in what ways might we create cultures of creativity or innovation where people are more instinctively and organically inquisitive and improvisational. Out of that kind of grew this concept of agility. Agility really talks to, speaks to how organizations really need to react in real time, especially these days where changes are rapid. It was a cliche even in our youth, but now, I mean really it's one thing one day and one thing the other. And so organizations need to be able to react in real time to rapidly changing events. The pandemic, for example, created a huge example of this. I mean people had to restructure their entire organizations around staffing personnel, how they operated, they had to get online savvy, et cetera, et cetera. And the companies that did that best were the ones who were the most flexible. And so agility training comes out of the concept in some ways of organizational improvisation, but it brings it down to the level of, okay, so then how do we train leadership and leadership teams to work cross-functionally and work more in terms of exploration of what solutions they might find and less objectively focused from their siloed positions in the company. Well, Doug, we're winding down here and I'm really glad, it feels like we're just starting to get things rolling in the discussion and it's a very interesting discussion for me and I hope for our viewers. I would encourage our viewers to visit your website and also to listen to your podcast because they're very practical and they're very interesting and they're very easy to listen to and very pleasant. So Doug, I thank you for being with us today. My pleasure. To our viewers, we thank you for joining us and I have been, I am and continue to be Darling Boyd. I was your host today for today's show in the series of The Creative Life and stay with us and we'll be back in two weeks with another exciting, revolutionary, revealing life of someone that is living a creative life and also or also working with people to help them to promote their creativity. So until then, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.


everybody. I know I've been gone for a little while. If you are new here, my name is Megan and I was a substitute last school year and I'm gearing up to do the same. I had a couple of interviews a few months ago and nothing really panned out. I applied all summer long and nothing. I got a couple of callbacks while I was in my summer school teaching so I was unable to go to those interviews. So obviously, you know, that didn't work out. So yeah, that is kind of how my summer went. It was very frustrating. I know I had a lot of you who were like, oh, keep trying, keep going. And I did for the most part. There was a bit of time where I just kind of took some time off of applying and was really considering what I wanted to do going forward and kind of in a last-ditch effort, I decided I'd apply for some clerk or secretarial positions as well as some tutor or support staff positions. So that is where I am headed today. If you can't tell, I do have my interview ensemble at least for the top and then just my black pants and black shoes on. And yeah, this principal emailed me last night saying that they were wanting me to come and interview or asking if I wanted to for this title one tutor slash noon supervisor position. So I'm not exactly sure quite what that means. I read the description over quite a few times and tried to get a good idea of what it was. Now I'm feeling a little bit nervous because literally this was like organized last night and then he was like, oh, do you want to do it at 10 30? And yeah, I had just woken up at 9 30. So my dog's really sick right now. So I was taking care of her all night. And I was like, yeah, let's do a later time. So we agreed on 140. It is currently 12 58. So I'm gonna probably be leaving semi soon. I don't want to get there too early, but I like to get there around 10 to 15 minutes early. So that's gonna be my goal. And that's a big recommendation or tip that I have for you guys is just getting to your interviews early. I know it's kind of a thing that people know. But yeah, so in case you're wondering, I didn't film anything this summer other than the summer school today is actually September 5th. It's Wednesday. I know a lot of teachers are starting today. So if this is your first day or was your first day, I guess, since you guys are probably getting done at this point with your first day, I hope it went really well. And if you're in like your field experience or your student teaching, I hope those went well also. And yeah, can you tell I'm nervous? Oh my gosh. So yeah, I hope you guys had a great first day. Or if your first day was a week ago or two weeks ago, I hope it was really awesome as well. Yeah, so there's my alarm. I'm gonna pause it for just a few minutes so that I can quick talk and then I'm gonna head out. So I did take a couple of notes just on the back of here. So I don't really want to show you like which school it's at, but it is a title one tutor position. That's what the title of it was. It's 5.75 hours 930 to 345. Now that's not ideal. But you know, it is something else and it's more within one school still helping students. And he even asked if I was interested in getting substitute experience at the same time. So I'm really hoping that it means that I'll be able to still sub as well. So fingers crossed for that one. $16.72 per hour providing remedial support for identified students for reading and math, assessing student mastery, working with individuals in small groups. And I think it's something about doing the activities that the classroom teacher assigns. So we'll kind of have to see what that is about. And then by weekly meetings and individual records for students. So to be honest, it doesn't sound necessarily like I'm doing a ton of work. I'm working with students and I want to see progress, but it doesn't necessarily seem like I'm the one creating all the lessons. On the description, it said that you need a associate's degree or like experience working with students. So obviously I have more than that. So yeah, I just tried to apply to some different things. I knew that the teaching and apparently the long term subs weren't working out for me at this point. So I wanted to try to branch out to something else. If it's sorry, if this doesn't work, I am going to start exploring some other options. I also started a babysitting position with a family in my neighborhood. I might start another tutor position. So I've just been kind of seeing other ways that I could still work with students and children, but not necessarily as a substitute. I'm fine doing that for another year. I just didn't, I don't know, I wanted to see if there were other options because being a substitute is kind of a guaranteed position. And these other ones aren't necessarily guaranteed. Plus, I'm hoping if I get experience within one school, maybe they'll have positions open and then I can get something else. So we will have to see. I've already talked for a really long time.  Wish me luck. Bye. All right, guys, I am back with good news. So I didn't officially get the job, but he basically like, so okay, let me back up. So I got to the interview about 10 minutes early, and I basically sat for 10 minutes while they kind of prepped and stuff and came back from lunch and all that. So then, really, he didn't ask me about the questions. He kind of just asked me about my experiences. And I assume that the questions were answered from talking about that. He said he really liked to hire licensed teachers, licensed, yeah, teachers. So that part was looking really good for me. Because again, like I told you guys, you only need an associates, two years associates degree to get this position. So they were really, really happy to see my name and my experiences pop up. So we kind of talked about that. He asked me a few different questions, like, do I know what PBIS is, which I generally do. It just like, if you asked me to clearly explain it, like verbatim off of what the definition is, I probably couldn't tell you. But anyways, so like PBIS and Fontes and Pinel and different things like that that I am familiar with, it just would be like a little bit tough to clearly define what it is. But I am familiar with those things. So yeah, we were talking about that. It's also a noon supervisor position. So you're kind of talking about that. He was giving me scenarios about helping students and what would be my first priority when helping out in the lunchroom and different things like that. So yeah, we kind of talked about that. And it was really interesting to find out that he says, in that school district in particular, you have to have a K through six license. So that was super helpful to hear that because he said that people who don't have that immediately get filtered out of the system. So they never even actually saw my resume or any of my information. And he saw me apply for this job. And was like, why didn't I see this girl when I was hiring for teachers? So he said, definitely, if I'm trying to get a job in that school district, I need to get my K license here in Minnesota. So that might be something that I start exploring. And yeah, I'm really excited. I hope my references, you know, give me positive or give him positive information and stuff like that. And they can attest to me being a good teacher and all that. So yeah. Yeah, it was super funny because he kind of seemed like I felt really good about this position. I mean, I'm kind of over qualified ish, not really, but like kind of. And so I had a good feeling the whole time, him and the literacy specialists were super nice and kind. And it was just a really nice conversation the entire time. My mouth was like super, I don't know, I just kept like couldn't form coherent explanations and stuff. So luckily my experience could speak for me. But yeah. And then he was like, okay, like, I have to call references and kind of see and do background checks and all that. But I'll be contacting you really, really soon. And I was like, Okay, great. Thanks so much. Nice to meet you too. So I start walking out of the building and kind of right as the first doors were gonna close, he was like, Megan, wait. And he was like, you know, we both looked at each other. And I was like, we're gonna hire her, right? And he was like, Yeah, as long as references and background checks go well. So yeah, that was really, really cool to hear. And he just kept talking about like, you know, get that K license. And they hire a lot of the people that work within their school. And he said, you know, if I get a reference letter from him, now that opens up eight other schools in the school district. So he said that this can be a really, really awesome opportunity. I can also sub if they need it. So I'll already know the students, I'll be working with them all year long. I'll be able to conduct assessments, work in small groups, make recommendations for students to kind of move around in groups and stuff like that. So he says this is a perfect experience. They have other teachers who or other tutors, well, at least one who also has a elementary license as well. So yeah, I'm pretty excited. I do like the small group stuff. Obviously, this is an ideal long term. But I mean, it pays the same as substitute teaching, I think it's like a couple hours shorter. So that parts a bomber but you know, I have my babysitting job, I'm gonna look into a different tutor job, it would just be like with one family not within a school district. So I'm gonna find other ways to kind of make those make a little bit more money and make things happen. So I am excited. And yeah, that is kind of my little job update. But I'm gonna make a separate video because I feel like this one's already getting kind of long to just kind of go through what I was feeling this summer and kind of what brought me to this point, I guess, because you just saw me after summer school teaching and you didn't see me since then. So I'm gonna give you guys a little bit of an update video. And yeah, I'll talk to you guys in that one. So I hope you guys enjoyed. I hope this brought a little spark of excitement to your lives because you know, this was just like crazy just happened yesterday. And just happened today. And so I'm really excited. And I hope that references go well because this seems like an amazing opportunity that I'm really, really excited about. So wish me luck. And I'll update you guys soon about this experience. Otherwise, you can watch my little update video about kind of what I've been up to and all of that and kind of how I've been feeling about teaching. And yeah, so I'll catch you guys in the next one. Thank you so much for watching. If you did enjoy, you can go ahead and push that like button helps get this to other teachers so maybe they can have a little spark of excitement in their lives too. Thanks so much guys. I really appreciate your support. And I'll catch you in the next one.


Good morning. I'm Robert Esker with NetApp. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about NetApp's integration with OpenStack, in particular in the Havana release, what we've been up to, and give you a little sneak peek into capability we're introducing for Icehouse and beyond. By the way, it's loud here. Perhaps you can hear me. I certainly can't. So if you have any questions, let's pin them until after, and I'll be happy to answer them. So just a little bit about NetApp and OpenSource. We have a long history of working with and around and in the OpenSource communities. If you look at our core operating system data on tap, it is itself BSD-derived. We are the primary employers of some of the primary maintainers of NFS and Linux, for example. And so something like OpenStack was very organic for us. It would allow us to join as the first major storage vendor as early as we did. So we've been involved for over two and a half years now. This is the sixth design summit we've been part of, having sponsored those. Our first integration started showing up in the Essex release, and I'll talk to you a little bit about Manila here in just a bit. So in a nutshell, and this is certainly highly distilled and maybe perhaps oversimplified, our core set of core competencies, the things that we do best, whether that be shared or dedicated storage solutions, making sure that those are delivered to you in a flash-excelerating cloud-integrated fashion. So obviously, in this context, we're talking about OpenStack. Our clustered on tap operating system, which I would expect most of you probably aren't familiar with, is a fundamentally horizontal scale out capability, clustered as in horizontal scale out cluster, scale out for performance, scale out for availability and such. That lends itself very much to the OpenStack Design Center. So it's where most of our emphasis is placed. If you've probably seen a variation of this, it's certainly not an app-specific way of looking at the world. But increasingly, future IT looks like a broker of services, whether that be something you build on your own premise with an OpenStack or maybe perhaps it's some form of interaction with a hyperscale provider or some other form of service provider. So how do we enable that? The notion of hybrid, hybrid cloud, I think, is still very much unrealized. So how do I actually connect the points? How do I actually move data between them? And is there a common runtime amongst them? Of course, OpenStack significantly eases that to the extent that it's adopted and that you could potentially have an OpenStack API availed at one of the top two places and certainly run it yourself. A very common use case, a growing use case that we see in that app is the use of OpenStack as a way to repatriate from Amazon web services. Or perhaps it's maybe not to bring it all back, but to establish more of a rational relationship so on an ongoing basis you can burst into it. What's OpenStack do? Well, it provides you, among other things, an API compatibility, the ability to take a code that was originally levied against an AWS and have the runtime on your own prem. That still leaves the remaining problem of data is most unlike a utility or a power utility in cloud. It's sort of the proverbial water utility. And this is certainly something I'm borrowing from. I can't recall who it was that set it first and how to attribute it, but the basics of it is that data has the qualities of mass, of gravity. It's hard to move from one location to the other. It takes time. The width of the pipes matter. Format is a consideration as well. So how do we actually achieve that? Basically, look for us to start unveiling some capabilities that connect these endpoints that allow you to establish a common data fabric amongst them and ease the movement in an opaque way and in a thin way between those endpoints. So again, OpenStack is critical in providing that runtime compatibility atop all of this underlying data fabric. So a very intentionally simplified view of OpenStack services and where NetApp's product portfolio maps to it. We see folks deploying OpenStack image, aka glance to great effect using our duplication technologies. That required zero lines of code to enable, but I'll talk to you in just a minute about some enhancements we've made. We've placed most of our development emphasis on OpenStack block storage on the object side. I'll talk to you a little bit about the deployment of Swift on a product that we call E-Series in a kind of a unique way that helps save you some money and scaling it at the extreme. And there's something missing when you kind of consider OpenStack as the leading open infrastructure as a service capability. So it's the mystery guest. I'll talk about that in just a second. And so NetApp does lots of interesting things well. My point isn't to go into all of those, but that's where we start with. Make sure that those capabilities that power your business or power your cloud, power what it is you actually need to deliver for your tenants, to meet your SLAs, and make sure those aren't hidden by the abstractions of OpenStack. So you want the abstraction to an extent in a sense that it becomes a way of keeping open and allowing you to move from one vendor or one implementation to the next, but at the same time, you don't want to dilute the value of those capabilities behind the abstraction. So that's where we start with. Make sure you can get NetApp unique capabilities through something like a block, OpenStack block storage service, AKCynder. So just briefly, let me show you a little bit about how we attempt to do that. So this is a, of course, horizon, and I'm going to show you how one, you can establish volume types. So here we've created a Hong Kong volume type and then a Macau volume type. It's entirely arbitrary. Whatever you want to call it, red, blue, green, dogs, cats, birds, whatever makes sense to your tenant base. Once you've established those, then you are able to take unique characteristics of a back end, so the Cinder driver instance. Some of those are listed here in provisioning, de-duplication, compression. QOS is not listed there. That's another capability. And you're able to compose those into these types. And so in the earlier example, I showed you a volume type of Hong Kong and a volume type of Macau. Now I'm going to actually attach. So you'll see that, oops, sorry. You'll see that the volume types we created and then you'll see volume type extra specs. And of course, since we haven't actually established or associated any with the volume types, we'll need to go ahead and create them. So in Havana, we have basically taken most of the gamut of OpenSec set of unique capabilities, whether they be efficiency, availability, performance assurance, right? Quality of service or availability capabilities and express them in the form of a volume type extra spec. You can take those capabilities and here we're going to take mirrored, we're going to take compression. And I can't remember, I think I used de-dupe as the last one. And we're going to associate them with the volume type. And you'll see that here just in a second. Sorry for my slow typing. And so now you see that, in fact, those are associated with volume type. So maybe a little bit more clear depiction of how this is all working. So, hey, I need to fire up eight Centos instances. Perhaps I'll select from an image that has a lamp stack on it. And I'm going to select from volume type silver. And so in that prior example, not the demo one, but the prior slide, we had defined silver as having a replication policy. And so what basically happens when you select from it is the volume type that's created becomes automatically replicated. It automatically becomes a mirror to a remote destination. So I also want to talk to you a little bit about the creation of instances, in particular where you might want to boot from volume. And some of the reasons why you might want to do that is if you actually want a persistence model by default. If you're not familiar, open stack, by default an instance is ephemeral. There's no assurance of data being retained over a boot lifecycle. That's certainly appropriate for certain style of application. But if you're moving any sort of classic infrastructure into an open stack as a service kind of model, then you will almost certainly want to provide a persistence model for that application stack. So let's boot from volume, but do it in a more efficient way. Here we're actually booting from an image. I want to show you an optimization that we put into Havana where we're able to take some of NetApp's unique block sharing technology or cloning capability to speed the creation of new instances. So again, by default, an image is copied out to the compute nodes. And if it so happens you want to light up another instance based on that same image that's been copied out. It'll take that cache and then use it. But if it happens that Nova says I want to put it on another compute node, then that copy operation has to occur again. And basically we're instead going to use boot from volume and where Glance is located on NetApp, the Glance image repository, will instead of copying it out the first time, will clone it, which is instantaneous. And it doesn't consume any additional space until there's in that new write or overwrite. So that's the first instance. And then thereafter, the same thing. We'll take that first cloned version and we'll create a hierarchy of clones. And the net effect is that you're able to create instances significantly faster than otherwise and there's not the storage burn associated. It also enables models when you're using boot from volume where you might be able to boot stateless. You don't necessarily have to have a local disk if you don't care to. So there's a variety of options in Havana for deploying NetApp with open stack block storage. The first question you ask is our classic mode, our seven mode or our next generation horizontal scale out capability, I just described, clustered on tap. Whether or not you want to inform the provisioning decision through some middleware capabilities, some NetApp products that allow you to do some higher order things beyond what we've described here or to have more of a direct model of interaction which tends to actually align better to hyperscale requirements. It's also simpler to deploy. And the last is ISCA's or your NFS. You may, one of the things that we contributed back in Fulsom, I believe, yeah, Fulsom is when we debuted it was an NFS reference driver and then a corresponding NetApp specific NFS driver. So you might think, well, a block storage service, how could NFS have anything to do with that? It's quite simple because the majority use case for consumption of a standard volume is an instance. It's a persistence additional capacity for an instance. We're basically rely upon the mediation of the hypervisor, the mediation of a component called libvert to mount NFS to the location of the compute node and treat files as a virtual block device. And we do that for reasons of scalability. You can do vastly more files than an export thing. You can do ISCA's or LUNs per storage system. That said, we don't have any preference here. There are obviously uses of Cinder where you in fact want a real LUN back, perhaps bare metal nonvert type of uses. So a summary of the things I just talked about, we also collaborated within the community, IBM specifically to enable a migration capability to go from one backend to the next. And the thing that I was referring to as missing is specifically support for shared file systems. So in going down this path, we've come to understand why there's some additional hard work. If you accept, and I don't mean for this to be very controversial, that OpenStack is very much built in the image of an Amazon Web Services. Well, certainly Amazon Web Services doesn't avail a shared file system as a service or distributed file system as a service, so thus OpenStack doesn't. However, we think that this has the ability to grow beyond it being an image, and I'm not gonna get into the API debate that occurred in the community over the last couple of months, but we very much do believe that the native APIs of OpenStack are valuable unto themselves, but so, in fact, is the shim support for large hyposcale providers. One of the things we're adding, though, is support for shared file systems. There's a new project called Manila in a nutshell. Hey, I've got instances X, Y, and Z, and I wanna provide access to an existing CIFshare to do gainful work. So this basically is the orchestration of that activity. I wanna create a net new NFS export. We built Manila to be sufficiently abstract to a shared or distributed file system type. So we've got folks like IBM who are looking at this from a GPFS perspective, Red Hat from Bluster, and we're actively trying to build community around this. We've just recently submitted the formal application for incubation. Unfortunately, we were a little late in getting that decided upon ahead of this design summit, but in mid-November, the technical committee will render a decision. We are already fully integrated in Stackforge, so we welcome anyone who is interested to join the community and look at and implementing your shared file system of choice. So I do wanna briefly mention, NENAP has a leading shared, a converged infrastructure solution called FlexPod. We work with Cisco on their UCS and Nexus line. The very first version of that is we're unveiling here this week in the form of a Red Hat OpenStack platform, a RELL OSP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenStack platform-based version. There is a reference guide, a reference architecture that's been published on nenap.com slash OpenStack. That's in a preview form, but the full release will appear here in the coming months. I also wanna just mention that we have an E-Series product which is a very dedicated, high throughput storage device. We'll have support. We already have a prototype driver for Cinder and we'll have that upstream in Icehouse. So look for that as well. And I did wanna briefly talk about Swift. So let's see how much time. I got one minute, so I'm gonna speak very quickly. Swift uses a consistent hashing ring for protection placement, which makes perfect sense given its initial design goals. We happen to think that one of the qualities of our E-Series product is it allows you to deploy Swift in a much more efficient manner, reducing the total amount of disk and equipment that need be deployed. Classically, Swift has not been aligned to a parity protection scheme because, frankly, you're exposed to very long rebuild times. We've taken the same crush algorithm that Seth uses, that same academic work and implemented another version of it in our E-Series line within the frame that mitigates the effect of these long rebuild times that you can now use a parity scheme again. And so basically it reduces the replication count significantly and it also reduces the pressure of the ongoing replication and removes an inhibitor to the ultimate scale you can achieve with Swift. That's also a reference architecture that'll be published on net.com slash open stack here in the next week. And I really wanna appreciate everyone's time here. Come see us at the Manila Unconference session. And likewise, if you're attending the design summit, we're trying to work within the center community to establish a common notion of all type extra specs for, and this is based on deploy or request. So if you have any opinions on that matter, I'd love to see you there. Thanks very much, appreciate it.