Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. So today, we'll be talking about CRD versus dedicated HCD. Lessons from taming high-churn clusters. My name's Hemant. I'm an engineer at Datadog. And I'm also a CLIUM CNCF maintainer. And this is Marcel. He works on CLIUM at IsoEllent. And he's also active in Kubernetes 6 scalability. So CRD versus KvStar. So if you're building an application that is Kubernetes native or like a controller, you have a decision to make. If you have some state that you want to store, you have a decision to make. So do you use CRDs to store that data? Or do you use a dedicated KvStore to store that data? So in addition to the total volume that you want to store, your data access patterns should also influence that decision, right? So in this talk, we'll get into some details on some of the decisions CLIUM had to make, right? So we'll discuss quickly some aspects of Kubernetes scalability and how Kubernetes scalability impacts different features in CLIUM and some of the current state and some of the options that exist in CLIUM today to help you and how the road ahead looks like and some of the lessons we learn along the way. So with that, I'll let Marcel talk about Kubernetes scalability. So let's start talking about Kubernetes scalability. So usually when you think about Kubernetes scalability, what you have in mind is like, what's the number of nodes, right? Well, wrong. Like, scalability is not just the number of nodes. When I think about scalability of Kubernetes, it's important to think about multiple dimensions. So number of nodes is just one dimension that you should care about when thinking about scalability. And the next thing that usually comes up to mind is the number of pods, right? But this is not all. So the question becomes, what are those other dimensions that we should care about when we are operating Kubernetes cluster at scale? So now we will talk about two different Kubernetes features that probably all of you are familiar with and try to think about how they affect scalability of Kubernetes. So let's start with Kubernetes services. So the idea is quite simple. You define service. The service gets virtual IP or cluster IP assigned.  So from client perspective, when you want to connect to the service, what happens is that you initiate the connection to this virtual IP. But you need to have some kind of proxy. And usually it's just kube proxy that understands the concept of services. So the proxy is responsible for translating that virtual IP to one of your backend pods and initiate the connection for you. So now let's make this thought experiment. If you were going to implement kube proxy, how would you do it? So first of all, obviously you have service object and endpoint object. So endpoint object is essentially a list of IPs of all the backend pods that are behind the service.  And corresponding backend pods behind the service. And all these objects live in kube API server. So they are actually served to kube proxy for read requests from kube API server. And of course, the proxy is running on one node. And it needs to understand all the services and all the endpoints. So it initiates the watch request to kube API server to get all the updates of services and endpoints. But of course, in the Kubernetes cluster, you have a bunch of nodes. And each node needs to run this proxy. So what happens in this case is whenever service or endpoint is being updated, kube API server actually needs to broadcast this information to all of the proxies that are running on your nodes. And there is one more component. So even though when you are thinking about services and there are some backend pods behind those services, the information that is exposed is basically only the IPs behind the service. So there is endpoints reconciler that actually understands what are the backend points behind the service. And it's publishing this information about IPs to an object called endpoints. So what's the issue with this design? Well, basically whenever you create new pod and this pod is behind the service, what happens is the endpoints reconciler needs to update the endpoint, right? And you can think of it as you can have one service that has thousands of pods behind it. And single creation of the pod makes update to the endpoint and this endpoint has thousands of IPs. So this huge object needs to be broadcasted to all of the nodes. So this is definitely inefficient. So that's why in Kubernetes, Kubernetes introduced endpoint slices. So instead of having like one-to-one mapping between service and endpoints, what you have is one-to-many mappings where endpoint slices have fixed amount of IPs behind, like within the single object, there is a fixed amount of IPs. So it's up to 100. And what happens then is like if you create the pod, then you don't need to send out all the IPs behind the service. What you only need to do is send the update of the endpoint slice, single endpoint slice that is with fixed amount of IPs. So now let's take a look at network policy. So in a sense, network policies idea is quite simple. You have some frontend pods, you have backend pods, and you have database pods. And what you want is, well, you want frontend pods to be able to connect to the backend pods and backend pods to connect to the database pod. But by default, in Kubernetes, like each pod can talk to any other pod. So it's possible that the frontend pod can connect to the other frontend pod or even talk directly to the database. So what you want to do is actually, you want to restrict those type of connections. And that's the purpose of network policies. So let's take a look at example network policy, how it describes such connections that are out. So first of all, you are starting with saying, okay, this network policy applies to those specific pods. But even though we were thinking about deployments, how deployments talk to each other, here we are specifying labels that we care about. So it says that the network policy applies to all of the pods that have this specific label. Then we specify whether it's ingress or egress traffic and which pods our frontend can connect to. And here's example where you can specify both namespace selector and pod selector. So what it means is, well, my frontend pod is able to connect to all the pods that live within the namespace with the label, like specify label, and then also those pods need to actually have specific label. Which means it's quite more powerful than just saying which deployments that you have in cluster can talk to each other. So now let's think like from kind of like the proxy perspective, how would you go about implementing such feature to actually restrict those connections that you are interested in? So again, like let's say we have some kind of proxy running on the node and well, we said that we need to be aware of labels of the pods. So like obvious thing would be to just watch for all the pods, right? And get all the updates of pods so we are aware of the labels of these pods. But the issue with that is that the pods are being updated quite often and there is no easy way to actually filter out what updates we are receiving. So think about like cubelet updating status of the pod. What happens is like as a proxy, we would be receiving all of these updates even though we don't really care. We only care about the changes to the labels in order to enforce network policies. Then of course like the network policies reference as well, labels from namespaces. So we need to be aware of the labels of the namespaces so we need to watch for those as well. And last but not least, network policies if we are going to enforce them. And again like if the proxy or whatever it is is running on all of the nodes, then each update would be propagated. So this is kind of like the naive implementation that you can think of. And we can see that if you have high turn of the pods then in this case the information would be propagated to all of the nodes. So we went through those two examples to kind of like think what are other dimensions that we should care about. So first of all like there is obviously number of nodes and number of pods, it's important. But then we should also think about pod turn. We saw that in both cases pod turn actually matters to take a look like how many different events are being broadcasted within your cluster. Another thing, number of services. Then like what's the churn of the beckons behind the services? What's the number of namespaces? What's the namespace churn, right? We still need to understand like those labels for enforcing network policies. And network policies and the churn of network policies. So just to recap like if we are thinking about scalability of Kubernetes, not just the number of nodes, but it's actually way more dimensions in just based on those two features that we were talking about in Kubernetes, we can see that it's quite multidimensional problem. So with that in mind, let's think about what's the target scale that we would like to support if we are implementing this kind of like proxy. So the target scale is based on official recommendations from Kubernetes. So you probably know that Kubernetes supports up to 5,000 nodes, then like less known limitation is recommendation actually is 10,000 services, then 150,000 pods, which means like on average you should have 30 pods per node. Then pods churn around 100 pod changes per second. It can be either creations, deletions or just changes of the pods. Network policies, this is something that actually we came up with for thinking about from ceiling perspective. This is not the official recommendation, but we need to establish some target scale that we are interested in. And also the network policies churn around 20 per second. So going back, Hemant was mentioning before that we are working both on Cilium. So Cilium is EVPF based networking observability and security. And one of the open source projects that we have is Cilium CNI. And as a part of CNI, we need to implement those two features that we were mentioning before, Qproxy replacement. So instead of like using Qproxy, you can use CNI to implement those things. And then also network policies. So I was mentioning before that the naive implementation would be to just watch for all the pod changes and all the namespace changes. But that's not how we implemented in Cilium. And the reason is that we are not interested in those updates that Kublet could be doing to the statuses of the pods. So how we went about this is, we created two CRDs. First one is Cilium identity. So instead of watching for the changes of the pods and namespaces, what we do is we create Cilium identity. And this is kind of like the summary of all the labels. Which means like whenever the pod status changes, for example, by Kublet, we don't actually need to know about it. Because we care only about the labels of pods and namespaces. And then we also have Cilium endpoint.  So the idea is that you have single Cilium endpoint per pod running in your cluster. And it's mapping between the pod and the identity. So we know that, okay, this pod has this particular identity and we know all the labels. So with that design, we only need network policies in order to enforce them. And Cilium agent watches for the changes of network policies, Cilium endpoints, and Cilium identities. So this is much better design as compared to like naive solution where we would be receiving all the pod updates within the cluster. So now let's make a step back. And I was mentioning kind of like the default mode in which Cilium runs, which is the CRD mode. But that was not always the case. So Kubernetes was released in 2015. For Cilium, initial release was also 2015. But well, CRDs were introduced in 2017. So I was mentioning about those two CRDs, but the question is like, so how did Cilium work actually if the CRDs did not exist at that time? And the answer is, well, HCD was used as the control plane for state management between Cilium agents. And please don't quote me on these dates. These were taken from Wikipedia, so they might be wrong. For example, like if you take a look at the releases of Kubernetes, you might see that 1.0 might still be kind of supported, like end of life date is empty, so I don't know. And to sum up, basically we have two different ways of running Cilium, one with HCD, one with CRD. And now Hemant will talk a little bit more about what are the differences, what are the pros and cons of all of them. Thanks, Marcel. I'm sure someone's going to make a Wikipedia edit now. All right. So we know that Cilium has two identity allocation modes. So there's the CRD identity allocation mode and the KVstore identity allocation mode. So if you take a closer look at the Cilium documentation, you'll realize that currently CRD mode is recommended only up to 1,000 nodes. And if you wanna go beyond that up to 5,000 nodes, it's recommended that you use the KVstore identity allocation mode with HCD, right? So let's zoom out a little bit and understand how the architecture looks like right now, right? So you have your Kubernetes control plan and Cilium primarily has two components, right? So there's a Cilium operator which runs as a deployment in your cluster and there's Cilium agent which runs as a demon set on every single node in your cluster. And there are other components like cluster mesh API server, depending on if you're using cluster mesh or not, but we'll not talk about that in this session. So depending on how you're managing your Kubernetes clusters, you might be running on cloud providers with using managed Kubernetes services. So if you're using managed Kubernetes services, you generally don't have to worry about your Kubernetes control plan, but your Kubernetes control plan is also backed by its own HCD cluster, right? So if you are using CRD mode, Cilium creates CRD objects so that the operator and agent can talk to each other and maintain state. But if you want to use the KV store mode, you will have to manage your own HCD cluster, right? So there is no way around that. You'll have to manage the entire lifecycle provisioning, maintenance and all of that. And when you use the KV store mode with HCD, Cilium endpoints and identities are now returned to your HCD cluster. So what are the challenges with running your own HCD cluster, right? So how does our day two look like with HCD? So for starters, you'll have to worry about taking periodic backups. Of course, you also need to know how to restore from those backups, right? And you'll have to run something called compaction, right? So HCD keeps track of the history for all the keys that are stored in HCD. So every once in a while, you'll have to run compaction so that you can save on your disk space. Luckily, there are a few options that are already built in in HCD. So you can set auto compaction and HCD will take care of it. But the problem is every time you run these compaction operations, it might leave your disk space fragmented. And if that happens, you'll have to run defragmentation operations. And this does not happen automatically, right? And you need to do defragmentation on a per node basis, right? So, and another thing to note about defragmentation is that this is kind of like a stop the world model. So every time you run your defragmentation operation, your HCD stops responding does not accept any read or write requests, right? And you'll have to run these on every single node in your HCD cluster. So you'll have to have something that coordinates those defragmentation operations. And HCD clusters also have default space quotas. So if you fail to do these defragmentation operations or something else happens and you end up filling your quota, HCD goes into an alarm state, right? And when it enters this alarm state, it again stops responding to read or write requests. And that's bad as well. And on top of that, you'll also have to worry about periodic updates, security patches and things like that. And the crux of this problem is there is no official tooling to take care of all of this. So you either have to write your own tooling or use some unsupported or unofficial things that exist on GitHub. And let's say you put some scripts together and manage the life cycle of your HCD clusters. That's not enough either, right? So HCD clusters are also very sensitive to disk and network latency. So depending on how active your clusters are and how big your Kubernetes clusters are, sometimes your disks might not be fast enough or your network might not be fast enough. Luckily, HCD already has some telemetry for this. So if you see logs like this, your HCD instances might need an upgrade. And it doesn't stop with that either, right? So you'll have to make sure that all the clients that are connecting to your HCD clusters are well behaved, right? So let's say you do an HCD rollout and so every time you do an HCD rollout, there is a chance that your clients might be skewed onto one of the HCD nodes. And this is not great for your cluster's health either. It makes the node with the most connections more prone to getting home killed. So actually API server already has a solution for this. There's a go away chance that you can set on the API server. And if you do that, API server will make sure that clients rebalance automatically. And if you find yourself in the situation with Celium Agent, you'll have to do a Celium Agent restart rollout to make sure you balance them again. And let's say if your clusters are getting bigger and you want to have more read throughput in your clusters, right? So generally three node configuration is the most common configuration folks run on. And this allows you to tolerate like one node loss. But if you want to tolerate like more than one node loss, you might have five node clusters, right? But the problem here is while trying to scale the reads and HCD is a Quorum-based system. So every time you post a write to HCD cluster, your majority of the nodes have to acknowledge that right. So in an attempt to scale your read performance, you'll actually negatively impact your write performance. So just horizontally scaling is also not the solution. And on top of that, HCD also does not have native rate limiting systems in place. So if your clients must behave for some reason or you're running into a bug, you could overwhelm your HCD nodes and which can eventually lead to being home killed. You can also enforce client-side rate limiting. Celium already does that. But that's not a perfect solution either because you cannot really coordinate all the clients at one place, right? So what I'm getting at with all this is that running your own HCD clusters involves a non-trivial amount of maintenance. And if you want to learn more quirks about HCD maintenance, there are already some great, great KubeCon talks out there, do check it out. You know why these folks are talking about it because they're running managed services. And luckily we actually have a great team at Datadog that takes care of running HCDs for us. And Maxime's here, he has built a great tool for us to automatically take care of a bunch of this maintenance. So as a thought exercise, let's say if you want to improve the situation, right? So what can we do? Maybe we can introduce a caching layer in front of your HCD cluster so that we can scale our read performance without having to take a hit on your write performance. Or maybe we can introduce a proxy that does some rate limiting before you send requests to your KV store. So does anyone know of a component that kind of already does this? A component that we are already like quite familiar with and use every day? Any guesses? Yeah? So a quick clue is it also has a very well defined API. So if you guess Kubernetes API server, you're absolutely right, right? So Kubernetes API server already implements all of these primitives.  Every time you make requests, HCD is gonna cache that response. So your read performance will obviously be better because it's coming from a cache. And it already has a battle tested priority and flow control system. So you can make sure you can protect your Kubernetes control plane. And it also has options for batching as Marcel spoke about before. So in theory, CRD mode should be better than KV store mode, right? So why is it that CRD mode is recommended only for up to 1,000 nodes? So are we simply solving this problem by creating some dedicated infrastructure and just throwing some money at it to solve the problem? So let's unwrap and take a look, right? So the core of this problem comes from this concept of Selium endpoints, right? So I'd like to re-emphasize here that Selium endpoints are different from Kubernetes endpoints. There's one part, there's one Selium endpoint for every single part that's running in your cluster because Selium endpoints are the abstraction that Selium uses to manage the network lifecycle of the pod on the node, right? And in order to enforce network policy, Selium needs to maintain a mapping of the IP address to identity. And it does that by watching Selium endpoints. So every single Selium agent in your cluster has a watcher against the Kubernetes API server to get notified on Selium endpoint updates. So let's take a look at a scenario. Let's say we have a 5,000 node cluster and we have a new pod that's scheduled onto one of these nodes. And soon after your container runtime creates a CNI add call to the Selium agent, Selium agent will create an endpoint object for you. So that endpoint needs to live in your API server because you're using the CRD mode. So an update gets posted to the API server. And soon after that happens, let's say you have a 5,000 node cluster and Kubernetes needs to support around 100 changes, 100 part changes per second. And that's the turn we are trying to target. And with the turn of 100 endpoint updates per second and a 5,000 node cluster, your control plane needs to process 500,000 watch update events. This is a lot of update events. Depending on how you've configured your Kubernetes clusters, if you have proper flow control and proper things configured, then it will either completely kill your Kubernetes control plane or it will take forever to propagate those updates through your entire cluster, which is also not great. So what's the solution here? Luckily, as Marcel mentioned, Kubernetes also had the same problem with Qproxy and the solution for this was Kubernetes endpoint slices, which allows you to slice your total endpoint objects into fewer batched endpoint slice objects, right? So a similar solution was also implemented for Selium and it's called Selium endpoint slices.  Those are a lot more manageable. So you're basically trading off some latency for scalability, right? The slide looks a little complex, but we'll walk through it. So the part where Selium agent, let's imagine a node has a pod scheduled on it and that part really does not change. So the container runtime makes a CNI add call, Selium agent creates a Selium endpoint object that gets posted to the Kubernetes API server. And then the new thing here is that the Selium operator is now watching for Selium endpoints instead of every Selium agent watching for them. And Selium operator is responsible for batching all of the Selium endpoints into a Selium endpoint slice, right? And we only need to send out that batched Selium endpoint slice object now, right? So that's basically 5,000 writes, a lot more manageable. And over the course of years, the Selium endpoint slices object has been, folks have been started to run it on production and we started seeing a lot more options to fine tune Selium endpoint slices. So you can precisely control how much your batch size is going to be, how you're going to group those Selium endpoints into Selium endpoint slices and the QPS set which the operator can write to the Kubernetes control plane. And there's also a way to now automatically configure them so that depending on how big your clusters are, you can automatically decide those rate limits. So it's getting a lot better now. But Selium endpoint slices, if you take a closer look at the documentation, they're still marked as beta. So in order to understand why that's the case and talk a little bit about where we are headed, I'll let Marcel continue. Okay, so let's first recap what was the story. So starting with Selium, Selium supported only the HCD mode, then CRDs were introduced, Selium started working with CRDs. In Kubernetes, endpoint slices were introduced and now we have beta Selium endpoint slices in Selium. So what's the future? So if you are interested in keeping track of all those scalability related improvements in the context of Selium, this is the issue that you can follow. And long story short, there are actually three most important things to mention. So first of all, we want to make Selium endpoint slices stable. And as Hemant showed before, there is quite a lot of tuning that you can do right now. But if we want to support end users, we want to make it really easy to use. So you just enable it and it works at scale. But then once we allow and say it's stable, we need to have still CI testing. So we want to actually cover scalability of Selium and CRDs in our CI testing. So once we say it's stable and people start using it, we want to make sure that there are no any regressions. So, and I'm saying 5,000 nodes again, but the thing is that it's way more than that, like all the pod churn, network policies, all this kind of stuff that I mentioned before. And last but not least, for users who are running right now in KB Store mode, we are working together with Datadoc on making it possible to migrate from KB Store to CRD. So I think the biggest lesson learned with all of that is that you need to consider access patterns in your clusters because as the scale grows or the churn increases, you need to be aware of amount of events that your control plane, whatever it is, either CRD or at CD needs to handle. And that's the most important thing I think to consider when scaling up the Kubernetes. One more honorable mention, so even though we're kind of comparing end point slices and Selium end point slices, there is still some difference because one is native Kubernetes resource, the other is CRD, and CRDs are basically JSON encoded, sorry. So native resources are protobufs, CRDs are JSONs, and this is some, this is really important cap to keep track of I think, even though you don't see it. So I would say basically it's C++ serializer and the idea is that it will bring down the gap between native resources and CRDs, so super exciting stuff to look for. But we still think like this is not required for scaling in the context of Selium for CRD mode. So thank you all. If you are interested in scalability topics, please chat with us. You can visit our Selium booth, and also please join six scalability channels. It can be either Selium or Kubernetes, we are on both of them, and please share the feedback. Thank you. And now I think we have five minutes for questions, if there are. No, Marek. There is a microphone somewhere. Okay, yes. I have a question. Why do you create separate Selium identity if you just to listen for label updates, if you could just use watch for only metadata changes, which is supported by Kubernetes as a feature? So actually like Selium identities are not the main source of turn, the endpoints are, right? So like, it doesn't matter, I think. And Selium identities allow you to like group different workloads together, so you can configure how you want your identities to be allocated. So if you just focus on a certain set of labels, you can aggregate different workloads into just one identity, so they all share one identity. So we need that abstraction to handle that. Thanks, it's a really great talking, interesting. I'm curious about the definition of churn rate. So I would have guessed that would have meant how often pods are being created and deleted, but is it actually how fast Qubelet is updating the status, and is that another screw you can turn? This is a very interesting question. So it depends, right? Like it depends on the component, what it means, right? Like some components care only about pod creations, right? But still, like even if you just watch for the pods, you are receiving all of the updates, right? So maybe you are interested in new pods being created, like in Qube scheduler, let's say, right? So the pod churn usually means like all the creations, deletions, and updates to the pods. But depending on the context, sometimes you care only about like some part of it, I think. But you are basically receiving all of the updates always if you are interested in watching the pod updates. And is there anything you can change that to say, I only wanna be updated on changes to certain fields or to tell Qubelet, please update at a lower frequency? Probably not. So that's, so about updating, I think, so this is the purpose of priority and furnace and that's one of the advantages of CRDs and API server over at CD that it can take into account amount of churn and throttle different write requests. Thank you. And one of the reasons why Celium Endpoint was created itself is because we don't care about all the pod status updates. So every time somebody posts a pod status update, we don't have to be notified about it. So the creating a separate object allows us to like decouple both of those things and make sure we only keep the relevant information. So yeah, thanks. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


It is Wednesday evening for most of us, maybe for some of us it's Wednesday morning or maybe it's Thursday morning. Thursday morning. Thursday morning or maybe it's Wednesday afternoon or Thursday evening or I don't know, but hello. Welcome to our wiki tree challenge wrap up and kick off for Ellen. So just to start off, we'll introduce everybody who's here. So we have myself, Sarah and Aowyn. We are wiki tree team members. And right next to Aowyn, we have Mindy who is the overall wiki tree challenge coordinator. Below me, we have Lucy who is Ellen's team captain which we will be kicking off after this live stream. Then we have Ellen who we will be introducing later but that is Ellen, our next wiki tree challenge genealogy guests. Next to Ellen, we have Emma, Dallin's challenge captain. And then we have Dallin who we're about to blow away with all of our wonderful findings. But first, maybe you're just tuning in. You have no idea what wiki tree is. Who are we? What do we do? What is it? And I think Aowyn would like to tell us all about it. Yes, I would. A wiki tree is a community of genealogists who are working together on a single family tree. Unlike a lot of other genealogy sites where you build your tree and I build my tree and we never talk to each other despite sharing several deep ancestors on wiki tree. When we get to a common ancestor, we work together to find information, share sources, add photos, tell stories and resolve any discrepancies that might be there. So in other words, we collaborate to grow an accurate single family tree that connects all of us. And my favorite part is, it's totally free. Yay, we all, we, everybody here I believe at least on this stream and maybe hopefully everybody who's watching loves wiki tree. I like to think so. I love wiki tree. I love wiki tree. So then we have the wiki tree challenge which is our year long event where each week we take a team of wiki treeers takes on a genealogy guest star's tree and makes it more accurate and complete than it is anywhere else. For instance, this past week we've been working on Dalin's tree and next week starting pretty much after maybe people are working right now we're Ellen's tree. We're gonna try to break some brick walls making more accurate and more complete. And this challenge is part of our year of accuracy where our goal is to improve our overall accuracy on wiki tree, make more connections and make friends. And we've been making friends every week and it's been great. So we will dive into get some stuff started there with all of the goodies. And let's go ahead and talk a little bit about how we collaborate. This is a community effort. A lot of team weren't going on. We have a spreadsheet you see on the left and that's for people to mark down the profile they're working on. When you wind up with 40 or so genealogists researching at the same time, you need that so we're not all doing the same person. On the right, you'll see a post. The G2G post is where we go and put interesting facts. We put bounty points and any questions that we might have for somebody. And then we also have Discord. Now Discord gets hop and we get talking in there and stays pretty active. That's our live chat. And if you can use Discord to join in, I really do recommend it because we keep each other motivated. You have people that can answer questions anytime of day or night. This is a global site. There's people from everybody. We do have a point system. Now that's not the only reason we're doing it, but to keep people motivated, we do give points. So for every brick wall that's broken down, we give 10 points per parent on that line. And then we add additional points for any ancestors, nuclear relatives. So if you're adding children, adding siblings, we like to take that whole family approach where you're looking at everyone and we add those in and you'll see more on who got the high points this week soon. I think that is the next slide, Mindy. So our top five, are we ready to say our top five? Let's go. Woo-hoo. And that's gonna be Maddie Hartman took our number one place again. Maddie just gets in there and I'll tell you what, WikiTree's addictive to all of us, but she has been in there every week working on this. We also had Joan Whitaker, Dieter Leverins, Emma Macbeth of course, and then me, we were in top five. And the score's just refreshed. So you'll see that I'm now in third. Just had to tell you. Yeah. We'll go, let's go, we'll go look at the, so our stats page and actually Joan actually was there as the one who broke the most brick walls. While Maddie was our MVP, Joan actually got more bounty points. She was our biggest bounty hunter. She went after to get those, get those big points. So these were our overall points for the week, but I think we did awesome, Daly, you're gonna be really impressed. We really did. And, you know, if you wanna break down to that total points, now that's combining both those bounty points and those individual points we give. There were 1,202 points given out. 258 of those were created ancestors. That means direct ancestors on your various lines. I'm telling you it, just this week, we just keep beating record after record. Now for the nuclear relatives, the siblings, the children, 534 profiles were added. For bounty points, 410, record breaker go team. You guys were awesome this week. Which means 41 brick walls broken. Yes. And then 1,288 unique profiles worked on, which is just incredible. I mean, just watching this community do this during a week is so great. And for total edits, so every time we add a record or we change a name or we do something that's called a contribution, or an edit, we did 6,061 in one week on that branch. So, hey, you guys did awesome. Always makes me so proud. Everybody did such a great job. Yes, they did. So now we have what we kind of started with. We were working on each great grandparent kind of working. Some people would work on one of those lines and we'll show you what we've found. Well, so we'll start with, and Emma will start, well, Emma will take it away since she was your captain. So this is the class line and we had a new mom added to Elizabeth, again, I'm gonna mispronounce all these names because I don't speak German. And that was Elizabeth Souksel. Does that sound right? A shout out to Dieter, who I was going back and forth with points on. He did a lot of work on the German profiles, finding the actual baptism records, translating records. I mean, he just did some amazing work and broke down some brick walls for us. And then this is on the Nells lines. We have a new father for Christian Bronco. Who was Christian Bronco? Well, he was Emma Nells, a parent, a second grade grandfather. Well, we have a new second grade grandfather. Two new second grade grandfathers. Oh, two, we have a, yes. On the same line. That's cool. So those were our German records. So that was probably Dieter who was working on. Prussian, I'd say. Prussian. What's next? And then this is the, this is our English branch and we had some great people in England who knew English records extremely well, knew where to find baptism records, knew how to find the family clusters, which is really important because when you find the family as a whole, it helps you work your way backwards. And they were breaking down all sorts of English brick walls. So we have a whole cluster here. I believe Chris was the one who broke down this brick wall. And we have not just a new set of parents, but we have a set of grandparents on both sides there. That's exciting. That's so cool. Oh, I think one of those, was one of those a correction, Mindy? On the cloud line? On the littler? Oh, yeah, the wife. On the littler. The wife was. Yeah. His, yeah, Thomas littler's wife. Was that a correction? Mary Cloud. Oh, okay. That's the correction right there, Elizabeth Sigley. So we have a new mother added there. So we have a huge section there where we broke down some brick walls. That's exciting. And then were those, the parents for Elizabeth, were those new as well? Or were they already there and then we... No, those are new as well. But because of the way the point system works, you only get credit one time for each branch. So that's why Elizabeth was highlighted. So her parents also had Elizabeth's parents, too, are new. Yep, those are new as well. They're new. They're just not bounty points. Yeah. If they have an ancestor that's closer that you've gotten bounty points for. So that entire section right there is pretty much all brand new. That's awesome. Yeah, that was really neat. And that goes all the way back to 1770s England. Is that chicken? Yeah, the William littler, like, yeah. Thanks, guys. Awesome, awesome. Wonderful. So this is the Greenlee line. So of course we're in England still. And we have a new mom for Thomas Reveley and that was Jane Dunn. Very cool. Finally, they had many children together. And he was a farmer. Oh, the Wolfsees. But don't worry, Dallin, they're not all farmers. I mean, my screen flashed forward. So this wasn't necessarily a new ancestor, it was just one of our interesting finds that we found out about William Pashby. Yeah, I think this is on the Greenlee line as well. Yes. He had three sets of twins, 14 children at least, a Greyhound dog breeder, and lived to be 94 years old. So. Incredible. It says he was a twin? Had at least 14 children. Oh, so I just snipped this. It's just a sticker that probably was on all of his children. That's a lot of twins. That poor woman who had three sets of twins. Both of them, yeah. Cause that was back in the day where it probably, you know, they had the- There weren't that many girls shots. Yeah, or being able to cut the babies out either. These sections. This was also the Greenlee line. The Thomas, Boynton, and Mary Hodgson found for Mary Boynton, also England. In the 1600s. Yeah, sweet. Who was this? Was this Joan, Emma, or? I have to check. I mean, if not Joan, somebody else in our England project who probably is in our England project? It wasn't Joan. No? Nope, not on this one. Let me check. But you'll notice there's not just a set of parents there. There's an additional- Grandparent. This is Elizabeth Viney who got this brick wall. Oh. I know Elizabeth. Yeah, we got- We had several people in England breaking down the brick walls. Yeah, we have an awesome England project on Wikitree and they're all just wonderful. So. Another Greenlee. Another English brick wall that was broken down and there was a change in the spelling of the name based on the baptism and the marriage records. And then the wife, Mary, we added a whole bunch of more ancestors to her as well. Oh, wow, I like that. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. I don't know if they were probably already existing on Wikitree and we just connect. I'm not sure how that happened, but she got four more generations added, at least on the paternal line. It's probably a case where the christening records were available and they often only listed the father and didn't, or they listed the mother but without a last name. So that's probably why you see just the father's going up the way. All the way to 1610. Wow. Awesome. Much less do it in a week. This is incredible.  So you don't have to like try and take notes or remember it all, cause it's a lot. We still have more. So don't, there's still more. We're not even to mom's side yet. This is the sprigsline. And you'll see the DNA flags popping up and we'll talk about those at the end. But this is the sprigsline and we have a new set of parents for Mary Essex. And that takes us to the early 1700s. And where is this? This is Northampton. Yeah, still England. Got lots of England. Oh my goodness. Lots of England brick walls. And another set of parents for Elizabeth Beach. And I think those may have been a correction as well on that one. I like the last one. The father was a correction and the mother was new. Okay. Okay. And I guess we also, it looks like there's another, the little blue arrow you see there, that means there is a father for John. So there's another ancestor there too. A lot of times what happened, the reason there were some corrections is there might have been more than one John Peach and the wrong John Peach was attached to the family and after the entire family was researched by the researcher and they got to know the families, they were then able to separate them out and figure out the right one. That happened multiple times in the work this week. Yep. Especially in England, we have these common names. John. Yeah. John. Yeah.  And then another one on this line. And we're still on the Spriggs line and we have a new set of parents for Henry Coleman. Who was Henry Coleman? Well, he was a normally in Spriggs, great grandfather. I know who John Spriggs is. Yep. And now we're on to your mom's side of the family with the Norwegians and I'm not sure where this starts, I guess on the Christiansen line, I'm not sure, but we, wow, we have an entire new set of people because there was, I think this was a correction, wasn't it, Mindy? These were new parents for Margrethe, are we on that one yet? Yeah, that's where we are. Yes, yes, those were new parents for her and there were 12 new ancestors added on that line. The sketch of the church that you see, once you click on that, it shows up on the profiles for the people that were baptized. You had several ancestors that had their kids all baptized there, they got married there and they're all linked to that page, so that's kind of fun. Yeah. I want to give a big shout out to all the Norwegian researchers who are helping us throughout the week. We would go out and post in G to G and say, I need a baptism record or can someone please transcribe this for me? It's, some of the writing was so old you couldn't read the names of them and they were fabulous. They went out and found things, the actual records and gave us links and they helped us break down all sorts of brick walls, so a big thank you to them. I know there was a lot of work done on the Norwegian naming conventions this week too, which I can just, it just kind of blows me away because not everybody has the same last name because they were named the first name of their fathers and then that was their last name, like Eric's daughter. So it- We had to do a lot of corrections because a lot of people when they create records don't realize that the patronymic system is in place and so they would give like their father's last name as the last name and that's not correct. So there were some corrections that we made and sometimes the records don't, the spellings are different and we might see five different spellings. So we spent a lot of time being very careful to try to find the correct spellings. Thank you. Mindy. Yes. Mindy, we had a question, where is that church? It's in Fett, it's in Ackerchuse, Norway. Oh yeah, we're at Marguery, where if you see here where she was born in Fett, however, whatever, however you say all of that, that's where the church is. Oh, this is the Westview line, isn't it? I believe. Then we have some more Norway, some other corrections. So this is one I worked on and this was thanks to help from our Norwegian helpers in G2G, we got a corrected father. It was Johan Olsen before, but it was the wrong Johan Olsen and some people had attributed his wife as the mother for Cary and it was actually a woman before he married that was her mom and she died really young. So we would not have been able to figure this out if we hadn't had the Norwegian researchers helping us figure out the information. Because I can go ahead, Mindy. I was just gonna say, and not only do we have the live chat, like I said, but what other site can you go to and you can just hop out on the G2G and go, I need to know what this means in this record or I don't understand this part.  We were really relying on that. You end up with more information than you even expected, which is so exciting. I didn't expect to find this corrected mother the way that they discovered it and it was exciting. Because I was gonna say it probably would be confusing because the mother had the same last name as the daughter because probably her father was Johan. Exactly, so. I'm especially grateful for all the corrections. This is wonderful. Yeah, I'm sure all the bios are written and well sourced as well. That's part of our year of accuracy. We spent a lot of time being very careful with the records and making sure we had the right records for each person. And hopefully there will be lots of research notes on all the profiles. Is this the one you did, Indy? No, I didn't work on that one. Oh, okay, maybe this was Maddie. I can't remember who broke down this one, but we have a new set of parents. I'm gonna say it was either Maddie or Marina, who I believe found the original records over at Digital Archives and was able to get another generation added on there. Okay. Cool. That's cool. And then, so that was all your new ancestors and this is the beautiful fan chart that Mindy likes to make for us. This is impressive, I gotta say. That's not all the ancestors. That's just the ones up until we made the slideshows. We have quite a few more. So there's more for you to look at, Dallin, after. I hope you can stay awake. Yeah. After the slideshow. After the line cast. It's gonna take you a while to go through all of this. It looks like it will, yeah. It's gonna spill over into the wall. That's really amazing. So do you wanna explain this chart, Mindy, that the bees are all the potential brick walls that we did break? The yellow spots that are filled in, every one of those is an available brick wall that somebody could focus on and build the line out so that they could hopefully work on it. The bees and seas where they just kinda look like dots, you'll get the actual chart where you can zoom in and look at all the names and dates and what they are. Any of the bees are brick walls that we broke down, every one of the seas are correction. So basically everywhere you see those on that fan chart, one of our wonderful team members broke through something and got it fixed. The two light blue lines, those were just ones that were prepped up. It looked like we were gonna be super, super close to breaking through on those. But once again, like Emma said, we tried to leave research notes on the ones that we could, so you've got breadcrumbs to work with later. Terrific. And that, you have a lot to look at, Dallin. I do, yeah, that's really amazing. Sarah, are you able to show the family tree view of history real quick? Of starting with Dallin? Or? The family tree view, yeah. I like to look at all the DNA confirmation flags. Oh yes, we can definitely look at that. Yeah, you did it, though, pretty much got all of them. Almost. Thankfully, both his parents have tested, which is- Oh wait, sorry, I'm not showing it. I forget, I don't, there we go. Next generation. So we were able to confirm everything except that one little spot down at the bottom. And actually because of the Norwegian, I didn't expect to get, and German, I didn't expect to get this much done. So this was exciting to, all of us have confirmed with DNA. Really cool, Emma. Thanks, Emma. That's incredible. Super awesome. Thanks to your parents for letting me do their- And then we had a free space page that we had somebody, it was a last will of testament of Henry Sauer, so just an example of not just a profile page that we work on, but a free space page where they transcribe the last will and testament of one of your ancestors. Okay. So. Yeah, and that one was really cool. There was a disagreement over 80 acres of land and Charles Sauer, which was Emma's brother had agreed to pay his father $200 for the land. And then there was dispute between the, you know, the descendants over what was still due and what hadn't been paid. So it was just kind of fun. And, you know, the profiles that are mentioned for the people that are mentioned in the will are actually linked there. So when you go through and you read that will, you can actually link to that profile and see who that person is. That's cool. Yeah, potential new profiles to be made that are involved. So, yes. And we also have a free space page for each week, which we put our interesting finds and any pictures or free space pages, potential sources we find. So we kind of do this for each week too. Yeah. I think we, I think everybody did a great job. What was, was there any, did anybody have any questions for Dallin? Do you have any questions for us or remarks, comments? Like, I'm just completely amazed that you've been able to do this much in a week. I mean, I, especially going back that far, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even know how to begin to do, to do what you do. So thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I wish we had more than a week because I just, I know there's more records, especially on the Norwegian side, we could keep going. It's the beauty of wiki tree that we have all of these different people, genealogists from all over the world that collaborate together and it's free. So it's, I think it's awesome. Yeah. You can really see the part of wiki tree in this. It's amazing. I mean, I knew it was cool, but I didn't realize it was this cool. We're making a believer out of them. Yeah. That's for sure. Maybe somebody's asking about the offense story. Oh, the way, yeah. I mean, you didn't talk about the one about the property. I think I had penced the property in. Do you have that? Oh, that was, that was Jason. I think it's actually here on the, I think it's here on the. Yeah. Okay. So Jacob Christopher Nels was sued over the ownership of a fence. He had agreed to split with the previous neighbor when enclosing his property, Jacob lost the lawsuit and was forced to share the fence with the new property owner next to him, Charles Gray. And it was kind of funny because they actually had this whole detailed thing about how he had worked out with a prior landowner that they were gonna, he wanted to fence his property in and that they were going to split the fence, basically the cost of it. And they agreed where this fence was gonna be. And then the neighbor sold the land and Jacob said, well, no, I'm not paying him for half that fence. He doesn't get to own half that fence. It's on my property. Look at the property lines. We love funny stories like that. Oh, squabbles over property, such a good time. And I think that would be it for Downs week unless anyone, was there any other questions that we had in the chat? I didn't know if. They're just all really impressed by what happened. They just keep saying, well, it's amazing. Good job. Way to go, Norwegian researchers rock. They do. Woo, awesome. So proud of everyone. And thank you for letting us work on your tree. Well, thank you. This, I really sincerely appreciate it. This is amazing. Lizzie, Lizzie says she gets emotional every week by watching because a wiki tree is amazing and it blows her mind. I think we have blown most of our guest stars minds each week. Definitely. I hope Ellen is ready for her minds to be blown with. I am so ready. So ready. So I guess we will, unless there's any other final anything for Dallin, we will probably hop over and start talking about Ellen and what she will be looking forward to in the coming week. So we have Ellen, who is Ellen? Who is she? Can I tell you? I would love to. I'm excited. Cause I've met Ellen a couple of times and Ellen is awesome. So Ellen has had a deep interest in genealogy since her teenage years. She's a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She loves genealogy, genetic genealogy and old photos. She's a member of the Alberta Genealogical Society, a co-chair of the DNA Special Interest Group. She is a senior ambassador for a company called Forever. They're a complete memory keeping solution. So they do like media conversion, storage printing, all those kinds of things. She's the owner of an online store called Shop the Hound which you haven't gone and looked at, you should because it's just got all kinds of really funky and awesome and genealogy related things. And she is one of the people who generously donates prizes for our source of fun every year. Yay. It's my pleasure. Dude, did we cover everything Ellen? Was there anything that we missed? Yeah, no, that's you cover pretty much everything. I was surprised. Got everything. She does a lot. She does. And we're looking forward to working on her week. I am looking forward to. So we have, this is her starting tree. So, and there's a few, there's like, I don't think, at least for the guest stars we've had so far, we have, there's a gap there, which I'm excited to see if we can break. So. I have a lot of brick walls. Well, we are so looking forward to working on them. But what, what are you interested in genealogy to start with? I guess, I guess it was family stories. My dad used to, well, my dad and mom would tell so many stories at the dinner table and just got me interested in these people. And so then you start wanting to find out whether some of the stories are true because some of them are a little bit, you know, and of course it's, at that time I was watching Roots and like many people were. And I, so I interviewed my great-grandmother and I wrote down all the answers that she gave me and started working on it. But then, you know, you start having babies and things, life gets in the way and I didn't do much and then put it aside and then started up about 15 or 18 years ago. I don't know. I do it 24-7, I say, if I'm up, I'm doing genealogy. Nice. The only time you're not doing genealogy is if you're asleep. Yeah, I'm probably dreaming about it. So who is your favorite ancestor? I don't know. Well, the one I write about a lot and if anybody follows my blog, it's called Hound on the Hunt. I write about Willie Beaton or William Beaton. He was my great-grandfather and he was an orphan or an adoptee. And so I always try and figure out who his parents are because I can't get any further back than him. So I write about him a lot. I write about Jesse Vincent. He was a second cousin, well, first cousin's two times removed and he actually died of the Spanish flu in 1918. And so he survived the war and all these things and then came home and died of the flu. So I thought that was sad because he was only like 20 years old in his 20s. Yeah, so. So we actually have, at least on WikiTree, William Beaton as I'm known as the last name. Well, because so his name is Beaton. He lives with a family named Beaton and his sister lives down the way and she's living with a family named Batten. And I know through DNA that they were brother and sister because I've matched to them, but we don't match the people that were the Beatons. So I don't know, I mean, I keep trying to figure out what is the name I'm looking for. I think I kind of know. I've gotten closer and closer through DNA. So yeah. Well, maybe I know Emma's gonna be helping with your DNA stuff and maybe who knows? Maybe somebody can figure, I mean the power of WikiTree. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I spent a month in Kingston, Ontario looking for records to try and find orphan records or I thought maybe they might be home children and that kind of thing. And yeah, so I'm stumped. So a fresh set of eyes would be great. Do you have any, besides I think this, the will it, the fact of these two siblings living with different families. Do you have any other interesting stories to share about your family? Well, probably a lot or but maybe any favorite ones. Stories? Well, so in previous episodes I've heard you guys talking about interesting ancestors. I have one that's, well, I come from a long line of fishmongers out of Sussex and Brighton. And so that's, when I went to England, my cousin was like, oh, we're a long line of fishmongers and I didn't even really know what a fishmonger was. But anyways, Noah Clark, who is one of my great uncles, he actually had a fleet of fishing boats. And he also was the founder of the Albion and Hove football team in Brighton. So he's kind of interesting. So is Noah Clark related to Alice Clark, one of your ancestors? Yeah, that's, yeah, that would be her uncle. And Ellen, when did you first discover Wickey Tree? I discovered it through Mags. I met Mags a few years ago. And of course, she's always talking about Wickey Tree and kept encouraging me to put my tree. And I kept trying to find time. That's the problem. I think Deer Myrtle was saying that the other, Pat the other day, about finding time. So I finally did find some time, but it's more of a twig rather than a tree. I do most of my work on, a lot of it on ancestry and that, but yeah, so I'm really interested to see, well, what I got right and what I got wrong. So, and then when you're talking about brick walls, I have tons of them. That was my next question, took it out of my mouth. So I have Willie Beaton and then on my dad's side, my grandfather was illegitimate. And so he actually had a delayed birth registration. He took the name of his stepfather. And I did find a birth registration and his father was listed as Godfrey Myrtle. And he was a stone mason. So of course he's my brick wall. And so anyways, I thought, hallelujah, I'm gonna be able, this is gonna be easy, but I can't find Godfrey Myrtle. I think it must be Martel or something like that because my dad has a lot of French DNA. So I have that. And there were stories about on the middle bro side and they were, there was talk of a brewery. So I don't, I could never find, I could, there is a middle bro brewery, but I can't find a connection to that. Now, we know you want brick walls down and you do definitely have some big ones, but what other things would you like to see come out of this challenge?  Well, like one of the, well, I guess it's a brick wall too. John Henry, who is one of my great-great grandfathers, when he passed away, his wife just disappears. I don't know where she ever ended up. I can't find her. I can't find her marrying somebody else or, so I don't know. Yeah, there's so many, so many stories. I don't know. Well, they all have stories, don't they? It's just a matter of finding them and plugging them in, making them a complete, not just dates and names, full, adding color. I mean, when Mags likes to say, adding color to the group. I mean, and that's kind of where I got, when I got started, I remember going to my first class, I was getting ready to go to a class for taking for genealogy. And I started looking for my great-grandfather, Jesse Oliver, and finding him in the census and finding out that he was a plumber. And I just thought, wow, he suddenly became a person. He wasn't just the name and the date and that kind of thing. And I mean, one of my sons is named after him because my great-grandmother used to talk about him with such love and he was such a fantastic man. I thought, if my son could be anything like that, that would be perfect. That's really cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, so. So do we have, I don't know, Ellen, do you have any questions for us or do we have any, or Lucy, do you have any questions for Ellen as the captain for week? We have any questions in the chat. No questions, but Victoria, Jane, said she had a similar story to Ellen's grandfather. Her dad was illegitimate and adopted by his stepfather. So. Common ground. Mm-hmm, yeah. So my, the story, the family story was that my, when my dad or my grandfather was going to get his, I think it must have been his pension or something. He just got a delayed birth registration. He'd gone to a lawyer and said, you know, what should I do? My mother's name is Shannon and I should be a Shannon. And the lawyer told him, and now whether this is true or not, but the lawyer told him to, well, you've always been a Thompson. So just be a Thompson. So that's why he's registered as Thompson. But according to his original birth registration, which you can find, so he's registered twice. And, and he was supposed to be Harold Alfred Myrtle. So thank goodness. Nothing against anybody named Myrtle. Sorry, but Ellen Myrtle just doesn't sort of seem right. Yeah, thinking if that, that name would have been there, you would have been. That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. So it's always interesting the circumstances of our ancestors, which leads to where we are. Well, and you wonder whether some of those stories are just made up or if that's actually true, right? I know I have debunked many stories that my, like my grandparents told my mom. Yeah, well, and then on the German side of my family, that would be on my mother's side, the Kotman side. They used to always say that my, wouldn't be my great-grandmother, but my great-great-grandmother, they said that she didn't, she came from, well, not royalty, but maybe richer people and that she didn't know how to look after the house or anything because she was used to having servants. So I don't know if that's true or not. So I haven't really done that much of my German ancestry because I don't speak German and I don't read German. Frank has been, he's not, I don't see his name today, but Frank has sent me a few things, little teasers the last week. We have Dieter and Frank who will probably dive into your German side. Yeah, so it's really, because he sent me one, I think it's my two times great-grandfather and he was a musician. And I thought that was, I didn't know that. So. Pretty awesome. Yeah, I have, yeah. Lots of things to uncover, potential brick walls, some stories to find. Lucy, did you have any questions or are you, not really, it seems like there's going to be a lot of work to be done. Anything you want to do, it's going to be available. It'll be right open, right? Yeah, you're up for it, Lucy.  And Ellen, I'll get in contact with you about the two unknowns that we'll be using the DNA to see if we can figure that out. I'm very excited. I hope maybe my fresh eyes can help you with that. Well, that'd be great. I mean, I've tested literally everybody in my family. All of my mother's siblings that are still alive, I've tested. All of any children, if they're not alive, then I tested the children, second cousins, you name it. My kids are not getting an inheritance. I've spent it all on DNA. I'm not on the same way. They know that. Awesome. Their inheritance is knowing where they came from. Yeah. Their genealogy and their DNA. That's it. Well, that's awesome. Well, I don't think we have any more questions. So unless there's any last comments, remarks, anything at all, we might. That's the fabulous stuff. This is great. Yeah. Yeah, we're really excited to start working on your week, Ellen, I'm sure. They're already going. We part of my already have points, I'm sure. And thank you, Dallin, for letting us work on your tree. It was great. I know everybody had such a great time. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you, Emma, and thank you, Lucy. Thank you, everybody, who's watching. And don't forget, you can check us out at wikitree.com. And maybe if you want to help participate in April, registration is still open until tomorrow. Actually until the 7th. Until the 7th. Until the 7th. So if you want to help us break brick walls for the upcoming weeks, if you want to take part, if you have, and you can do anything, like you can write biographies, you can find sources. There's a lot of stuff you can do. So come check us out. We will see you Friday for Friday date night, Saturday for Saturday livecast, and then next Wednesday to reveal what we have found for Ellen. And who's on next week, Mindy? Who are we starting?  Tim Janssen. Tim Janssen. Yes, I knew it was in my brain. So, and that's it. It's been a great time. I hope everybody, I think it went wonderful and we're thank you everybody until next time. We will see you then. Thanks. Goodbye. Great week. Thank you.


I'm basically waking Bill up with breakfast. Guys, I had to go all out for this. This is my outfit. So basically I'm gonna be serving him in this.  Hey babe, this is the devil. Excuse me? What is up Marvel Squad? And welcome back to our channel. As you guys can see, Bill is currently asleep so I have to whisper I do not wanna wake him up because today I'm gonna be doing this trident that has been going around on YouTube and I'm actually really excited to do this because I don't really think it's not really a prank. It's more of like a reaction. And what I really like about this video is I'm basically waking Bill up with breakfast and who wouldn't be happy to wake up to breakfast? Like I know I'd be happy to wake up to breakfast but not only am I gonna be serving Bill breakfast. I have some things at my plate. So the other day I went to the Halloween store and I got a, since it is spooky season, I got a Halloween costume. I got a red devil's costume. I'm gonna go show you guys like what. So I got like the devil ears, a little top to wear, these red shorts that I'll put on.   I just think the fact that I'm going all out and I got this Halloween costume is gonna make it 10 times funnier because he's gonna just be like, what are you doing? I'm also gonna try and hurry and make this breakfast. I got a microwavable food. So it's kind of like quick and simple and fast because I don't want him to wake up before and if I'm cooking food, he's gonna hear me down here cooking. I also got him a naked drink. He loves the smoothie drinks. And I think what's gonna be funnier is, oh, you know what else I got you? I also got naked.  I think it's gonna be so much funnier. So that's why I got that drink. I think it's gonna work perfect because when you're first waking up, you're kind of like delusional what the heck's going on. Just make it like more romantic and make it into like a little scene. I'm setting up candle lights around the bed.  I had to come back strong on this one and I don't really think it's a prank. I think it's more a reaction and I think it's gonna be super funny. I cannot wait to pull this on him. But make sure to give this video a big thumbs up if you guys are ready for today's video. Let's check this video to 25,000 likes. I am super excited to get this video rolling. Also, if you're not already subscribed, make sure to go hit that subscribe button turn your post notifications so you guys get notified every single time we upload. And if you guys wanna send us fan mail, here's our PO box information. Here's our box number and the address to send it to. At the end of today's video, we're also gonna be opening up some of your guys' packages that we received in our PO box, which we're super excited to open up the camera for you guys. But I'm gonna go hurry up and microwave the food. I also got a little platter so I can put his food on it, make it like really sweet and cute and just spice it up a little bit. But I'm gonna go hurry up, cook the food and put my outfit on. And then once I do those two things, I will be right back. I'll see you guys in just a minute. All right guys, so I just got done microwaving everything. So I made him sausage, egg, cheese, breakfast bowl. These are so good if you guys have never tried them. If you guys should definitely get some. Then I think I made some waffles and some sausage and then here is his syrup. I put it on the little platter right here and I got a little fork and all that stuff. And guys, this is my outfit. I'm not sure how I'm feeling about it. I don't really feel that confident in it and it's not as cute as I thought it was gonna be. But here I'll show you guys like a full outfit. Like this is the outfit with the little tail and then like the devil ears. So basically I'm gonna be serving him in this. Write it down below. What do you guys think? I don't think the red really matches each other but it's all right. It's still gonna be good. I'm gonna go upstairs right now. I'm gonna go set up the candle lights around the bed. I'm gonna try to be as quiet as I can.  So I'm gonna take you guys upstairs right now and let's get this show on in a row. I'm so excited. I made you waffles, sausage, breakfast bowl. What's going on? And then this is your syrup. You wanna put syrup on your waffles? And then I decided I wanna set the move by putting candle lights all around. I thought I'd spice up by putting Halloween costume on since it's getting spooky season.  I set up little guns. Where'd you get candles? I bought them from the store. Hold on, give me a second to process. Can you take this off, please? Yeah. And babe, I also got something for you. What are you wearing? I also got naked. I got naked. You're getting naked? Yeah, I'm gonna get naked. Stop. You like the outfit? Wait, why are you wearing it? Isn't it cute? Isn't it so cute? Is that a Halloween outfit? Yeah, isn't it cute? And I set up the mood and I put little candle lights. Actually I wanted to put real ones on here because I didn't... What are you doing? I'm just being cute. I wanted to wake you up. I'm filming a YouTube video right here. Why is the camera on? Cause I'm filming it. I wanted to wake you up and be cute and sweet and obviously spice it up a little bit. Wait, what's the YouTube video? I'm just being sweet for you all day. I did a...   You are so handsome. Come here, kiss the devil. Excuse me? You look cute though. You like the outfit? Yeah. Wait, I don't want them to see me looking like this though. Oh my God. Mama Squad, tell him he looks cute. Wait, what are you doing now? Look, here's your breakfast. That looks... Ah. I don't think waffles, sausage, and then like egg and cheese. You know how to cook? Well, lucky it. I kind of... It's kind of microwaveable. Cause I don't want to hear you... How do you microwave this? No, this looks like legit. Yes. Waffles and everything.  I know how you love your smoothies. Okay, you're scaring me. What are you doing? Can I just be sweet to you? Good morning. Do you like my outfit though? I thought I spiced up the mood, you know? Like, not only am I serving you breakfast, but I served you breakfast wearing this. Wait, why are you wearing... Is that on the tail? You always prank me when something's going on. I just want to be sweet and wake you up with this. Do you like it? I love it, yeah. You love it? Yeah, I love it. I love to do stuff like this for you and I feel like I have done this for you in a while. And I thought, why not just have the mood do it for a YouTube video and set the scene, you know? Yeah, this is like extra. I know, right? So basically for today's video was I served you breakfast while you were in bed also while wearing this. Oh my God. You like it? That like is a little too much for me. A little too much for a YouTube video. Yeah, you look like too good in that. I look too good? Yeah. What? What do you want me to do?   Oh my God. I made a little mood for you. I set some candlelight. I even put some right here just to put some there and make the whole thing. Ooh, you're already eating them? It's good. They're good? Yeah. Aw, I'm glad. Is this major day? This is major morning? This is major morning. Aw. This is gonna make my day so much better. I'm glad. You're so cute. Come here. I know. I have the best girlfriend in the world, Mama Squad. Everyone watching this.  Oh no. Who gets spooky and wears a devil's costume for you.  I'm a little devil. You are. Guys, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm covering you up, by the way.  I had to be a little extra. For looking... I mean, I don't look that bad, I guess. No, you look cute, guys. Comment down below how cute Will looks in the morning. He looks so handsome. I love you. This is gonna be when we get our new place. That's what I'm gonna be doing for you all the time. It's serving you breakfast and cooking, off-camera cooking and stuff. And I'm just getting you prepared, you know? Maybe I'll be in a frisky outfit. When you told me the camera sound, I was like, what? Like, why? A lot of people did it while they were naked, but I thought to be a little different. What? I didn't want to do that. So instead, I just did it in this outfit. This is revealing, this is revealing. I don't want to, did you show them? I hope you didn't show them all too much. I did show everything. You did not twerk on him. I had a twerk on camera. No, you didn't. I even want naked. I got naked. You did not twerk on him. I got naked. I just can see that you got naked, but you didn't actually get naked. Basically today's video was serving you breakfast while wearing like this. So I'm wearing this. Oh my gosh. To serve breakfast, I want to see how you react. You like this? I just hope you weren't twerking on it earlier. I don't know if you have to see when the video that I did. Oh my God. I'm sorry if she did a little TMI too much of this. No, well, we're going to go, we're going to go enjoy our breakfast and morning together and we'll be back because we're going to be opening up some of you guys' PO Box. Oh my God, I totally forgot. Guys, we're going to film a YouTube video today where we've opened up you guys' PO Box openings and we'll just edit to the end of this video. Yeah, we will. All right guys, so we are officially back.  He's done eating. But it's okay, I'm done eating. That was that food smack, by the way. I literally almost ate all of it. We are going to be opening up fan mail right now. We got three letters and we have a box. We don't want to show the fronts of it because we don't want to get anyone to dress away. Just out of the time, this is all my heart. From this person, name is? Deja. Deja. D-A-I-J-A-H. If we said that wrong, sorry. Thank you so much for the letter. Yes, we're going to open it up right now. Let's pop her open and see what it says. I cannot wait, guys.  Ever. Ever. These are the first people in our life that we've ever received fan mail from. This is crazy. Just because we were slow with opening the PPO box. Let's see it. I cannot wait to see their handwriting too. Oh my God, this is awesome. Okay, so this is a drawing. She did a sunflower. Which is lit. That is awesome. She said, hi, I've been watching you guys for a while. You guys are so good at pranks and so funny. I hope you guys like the picture. I love the picture. I don't like it. I freaking love it. Thank you so much.  I was thinking of making a scrapbook for our YouTube social media. That would be so cute. Yes, all of our memories and everything. From day one to now, including your fan mail. Yes, we're going to get that going.  You know what I mean? People make wedding scrapbooks.  We're going to be making a scrapbook. So get ready. I cannot wait. Oh my God, this was so sweet. Thank you, Deja. All right, I get to open up the second one. Jaden, Jaden Bailey. Thank you so much. All right, we got a letter. This is September 18th, 2020. She wrote this. That's cute. Dear Mariah and Bill, my name is Jaden Bailey and I just wanted to say that you and Bill are such a cute couple and a huge inspiration to everyone. I also love your hair, Mariah. Sure hairs be popping, right? I subscribe to your channel. I just think that you guys are awesome. I really enjoy watching your guys' videos.  You're so sweet. No offense to Bill, but it's Team Mariah from you. Hey, you already know. She says Team Mariah.  Love you guys. We love you more, Jaden. Jaden, you are so sweet. Thank you so much for sending out. That was awesome, literally. We appreciate all that support.  You guys are handwriting. That was a well-written letter. Next one is from Teddy Melvia. This is the last letter for today. Please open on camera. Okay. Oh wait, there's two. From Kalina and this is from Teddy. All right, I'll read Teddy's first. This is awesome. Look at what they drew. Oh my God. That is awesome. Oh my God, that is so cute. All right, that is, honestly, a spit image if we were cartoon characters. Oh, not wrong. That's awesome. I'm putting this in a scapegoat.  That is so cute. I forgot I'm tearing up. That is so cute. From Teddy, that was Teddy. Dear Mariah and Bill, I have been a fan of you since you guys had 40K. Oh my God, I'm sorry. What? And I have been obsessed. You guys are awesome. And whenever I'm upset or sad, I always watch your videos to cheer me up. I love you, Taco.  You guys are so sweet. They said I love you, Taco. That's awesome. He's literally so, so cute. I made some fan art. I hope you guys like it. I freaking love it. That fan art is crazy. You guys are just like, thank you so much. Thank you so much.  I appreciate the fan mail. And I'm so glad we can make your day every single time. This is from Kalina. She said, Kalina. Dear Mariah and Bill, I have been a fan for a very long time. Love your vids. You guys are the best couple. You guys make my day. I love your kitty Taco. He's so, so cute. That's awesome. Kalina, thank you so much. I just wanna say, Taco unfortunately is not gonna come in with us when we move. I'm really sad about that. But we'll get another Taco. So now for the picture. This is what? Oh, Kalina. Kalina, yeah.  Guys, you are artists. This is so cute. If you're not in art school or whatever in art class, join it. Teddy and Kalina. Oh, look it. They matched, coordinate the heart. That is sick. Oh my God. You guys are so cute. Thank you so much for the letter. Yes. That is the last letter for today. I'm so glad we could read them and get them in the mail. That's awesome. Now let's do the box. Let's see it. You guys are awesome. Oh, there's a package in the box. Okay. Let's see a box in the packaging. A package inside the package. Inside the package. It says, hey, Ryan, Bill, I'm so excited to be giving you this. I had this ready for a few months and have been dying to send it. You guys mean the world to me and I love you guys so much. Every time I watch YouTube, video, TikTok, or even see Instagram posts, I get an instant smile on my face. One thing to say is I don't even know how grateful I am that you follow me on Instagram. Ryan, Bill, forever. Oh my God. It's a cool little horse. It's a cool little horse. By the way, T. Mariah. T. Mariah. Wow. Anyway, thank you for everything and I love you guys so much. Kirsten. Kirsten. Kirsten. Ryan, Bill, forever. Go follow Ryan, Bill, forever. Her name is Kirsten. That is awesome. She did hashtag Marvel Squad. I remember her telling me about this when we went on live stream with her. But she... This is awesome. This is so cute. Look, she even has the tape marks and everything. This is lit. Oh my God. You guys do not know. Oh my God. You guys do not know. We do a lot of like canvas paintings on TikTok and stuff. Oh my God. And we really like doing those and challenging each other. Who could do better? Oh my God. So I guess this was an inspiration for her to make one for us. And I feel like we're gonna put this like in our freaking book. Guys, you guys are so sweet. So we have plenty more fan mail that I'm sure is coming on the way. I know many of you guys are just sending us mail. This is only... We went last week. We didn't open them yet. We went as soon as we can. We were excited. We literally went like, I don't know, five days after. Well, we're gonna be doing fan mail almost every time that we get fan mail. Whenever we go. Which is probably gonna be once a week because we're only gonna go once a week. But thank you guys so much. What I did wanna talk to you guys about is we're gonna randomly be picking people to either write letters back to or send like a giveaway and appreciate you guys appreciating us. We wanna start doing more giveaways. Yeah, so if you guys wanna be entered in our giveaway, if you guys do wanna send us fan mail, whether it's just literally just a note, you guys will be entered in a $100 giveaway and it's gonna be a surprise too. I wanna surprise you guys, send it to you guys. Send $100 or whatever. I wanna do a giveaway aside from the fan mail, just on social media as well. Just another thing to give back and enjoy our freaking family. Enjoy our Momma Squad.  If you do not subscribe to our channel yet, make sure to go hit that subscribe button and turn on that bell button to post notifications right next to it. So you get notified every time we post and, wait, if you're one of the first people to comment on our videos every time we post, you can get a notification shout out and we're actually gonna be giving a shout out right now. Okay, I'm gonna do this.  A shout out to Kalina, shout out to Teddy, Teddy, shout out to Deja, and shout out to Karsten. Karsten, all of you. You got the shout out just because we opened up your mail and it was really lit and we had a great time. All right guys, so although the question of the day, I want you guys to comment down below what's your favorite season. My favorite season is summer and fall and I love spooky season. I love summer, but I like the spring. I like the spring when it starts just getting warm. Actually Halloween is so fun though. Fall, I love Halloween. Dang, I have a hard pick. Okay, anyways, my favorite is spring. Her's favorite is spooky season and summer.  What's your favorite season, guys? Yes, so we hope you guys enjoyed today's video and we'll see you in the next one. But until then, peace, love you guys.


Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Silent Mike, we're bringing it back. YouTube Rewind. 5 years. 2015. Voiceovers were cool. Yeah. Why aren't they cool anymore? They weren't cool. We made them cool. Kana, here's what you need to do. You need to throw up on the screen from videos we did on my channel when we did the first ever voiceovers that mattered where Nadeem was sleeping while we were storing in the background. Basically, trying to make a YouTube career. And now we have Kai E bro over here gaming away instead of sleeping Nadeem. But it's a different time, similar situation. We're a little bit older, although we look younger and better. But not wiser. Older, less wise. Older, less wise. Omar Esauf in the house. He's been chilling here for a while. Mega bachelor pad Sacramento, California. Some work. Some play. It's a f***ing pad. Bachelor streamer recording house pad. We're lifting some weights. Some. What are the current goals? What are the Omar Esauf goals of lifting weights? To find myself. Oh, I would say actually I recently completed and I've only mentioned about 20, 30 times on my channel. But it's the first time here. But I should repeat it again. A successful body transformation while I lost some weight. From there, I want to rebuild my strength and so that's coming together along nicely. I'm honestly not sure what clip we're going to be showing.  So I was like, I'm like 180 pounds now. If you are wanting to get a strongman, I actually think I want to do a competition. And then I want to continue to build that strength base. And then finally really lean down. So I'm thoroughly enjoying lifting. The strongman base or the strongman competition. Are you at maintenance then?  I think I'll just be a maintenance because right now being around 181, 182, the weight class I want is 175. So you basically just don't drink any water for a week and I'll be at it. A couple more orgasms and lose some liquid water cut. That's the water cut that they don't want to tell you about. That men have an advantage. Yeah, a supreme fapping ability that's actually a period. Mine is about 13 seconds. So if you guys want to see footage of that, you'll have to go to his Patreon. YouTube's really cracking down on this type of content, but it is there. It is available. And today we want to talk you through a couple of our sessions, I believe. Yeah. Omar trains every day like an absolute animal.  He made me train two days in a row, which is against my written rules. I do like you said and called me an absolute animal. And here I am squatting 295 for a 5x5. Animals don't always come in big weights or big sizes. Right, right. The point is the work. The point is the work. So what's the current split looking like for you? I know you're sprinkling in the strong, man. What's the base of the barbell? Little dangle, dangle on the stangle. So what we got going on here, I lift six days a week. I was dealing with a little bit of knee issues. So you'll see me squatting a little lighter. Then I'll work up a little something, something. Again, I actually don't know what footage, Connor, film. I don't know. But this, I think it's a squat bench. I do basically full body. So squat bench, deadlift. And then I also do overhead press on this day. And like I said, I train actually five to six times a week because I like to really spread out that volume. So I'm only doing about 13 to 16 working sets. It's not a lot per session. Yeah, not everyone can be heavy. You can't squat heavy every single day if your frequency is that high, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm the exact opposite. My volume is low, my frequency is low, my intensity is low.  Even while I'm here? No, it's really turned up recently hanging out so much with you and Alan through all things are going wild. I think these are a mix of days. As you guys know, my splits kind of pretty set in stone, but the exercises aren't. So I started back low bar squatting again. I had a safety squat bar. Got a squat day that's tied in with all my push, deadlift day, tied in with all my pull. Super basic, super easy. Actually, my back's been a little angry lately. So I think two days at Omar were here. I was lifted in real light. And I saw someone say, like, Mike, it's so sad to see you how strong you were. And you went from a 700 pound pull and now in the footage you're pulling 315. What you work on, same with Omar right here, right? You're squatting 230 or whatever, it doesn't matter. The point is you're a 500 pound squatter. You could do that again in a six week cycle or training. You got to say training block too.  Point is, is what we're training with or what you can do is always what you should do. So although I could probably go to the gym and rip up probably a 600 pounds conventional if I had to every week, what would be the point? Where am I getting the volume? Where, what's gonna last me a long time? What's gonna love me a long time? And similar to your squat, like again, you could squat probably over 400 multiple times. But if you're trying to get the volume in, you're trying to get the hypertrophic stimulus that you want, you're gonna have to have some days that's a little bit lighter. Yeah, refining the skill. Even as an example here, it's like, this is the lighter days. So I'm doing I think 385 for a five by five. Two days later, 48 hours later, I ripped up five plates, 495 for four. You know what I mean? It depends upon what you show. And I think some people don't understand. When it comes to Instagram, it's typically highlight reels. So people hitting PRs. And I think that's how they have to train. And so there's different classifications of lifters. That was good right there. That's what, like 525? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, this is my heavy day. Yeah, that's my heavy day. I think I did, 525. 505 and then 525. Yeah, that's real good. Yeah, and they're both clean. Yeah, you think you can't pull 600 on that day? Like that's no bell. Right, yeah. Or pull 495 every single day. But again, what's the point? What's the point for me is to build some muscle back, build some groove back.  It causes them not to understand programming, honestly. It does.  Not that you can't lift heavy and it lift heavy often probably be fine. But there's no need to lift heavy every single day year round forever and ever. You know what I wanna say? You know how I know Connor's a true homie? Connor's the guy that edits Mike's videos of you. So here he is, making Mike just look great because Mike is great doing 525 on the deadlift. He's like, I'm gonna show almost lighter deadlift day. I'm not gonna show him do the 495. Maybe he's coming later. Maybe. No, I just know Connor's not coming later. I know it's not coming later. Getting a bonus this Christmas. What do we got? So this might be 185, it depends. Yeah, you were crushing overhead. I did 190 times three. That's one of the short-term goals. I want to overhead press 230. So that's the best ever. 226. Yeah, yeah, so we'll do this. This is maybe, I don't know. Yeah, I think you did. You were crushing like 185 for reps. I can't do that no more. Yeah, it's between 180 to 190, the different sets. So here's the another day. I think we have three days. This is another day. Throw in here, because this is your strongman day. Well, Mr. Alan Troll. Mm-hmm. Alan's small now, he's actually cold because he lost all that weight. I think it was in Alan Small. Oh, he didn't like that? No, no, I was saying that was his name instead of Troll. Well, I did call him Small one day. I said, I think someone was trying to get me to do a strongman competition. I said, oh, is that what Alan's going to be doing? I said, I don't want to go head-to-head with him, he's small now or something.  I was like, well, kind of. We've all been there. Large. I'm a little chunky right now. Yes, Alan, you were a little chunky in the past, but now you look absolutely stupendous. You're apocalyptic resistant, okay? If it happens, you'll survive longer than someone else.  Is that him right there? He is back there behind us. And Marcus. Philip, you know, Marcus is cool.  How do you determine your exercise selection at this point now? So I don't.  It will depend by my progression and depend how I feel. I know my high end of my squats are limited by my mobility and basically my technique, just because I can't hold that rack well. So I'll probably keep that in a little bit longer than perhaps I kept my safety squat bar cycling where the strength just kind of puttered out. I hit maybe 400 or something with that beltless. So then that's why I switched that to low bar, but haven't changed that one yet. And same with deadlifts. I'll probably get up into the 600s, then I'll switch. God, damn, you're lean. He's just giving all sorts of tees, right? Is it, let me show? That's why I keep my hoodie on. That's why I'm in the opposite room of him keeping my hoodie on. But then yeah, and so then same with the deadlift, I probably have a higher upper end or more weeks that I could stretch out my gains from it. And then I'll switch that variation into some bands or maybe a block pull. But the front squat, the only strength goal I have right now, direct goal is to squat 405 front squat. I think it's easily done. I just haven't done it. And so it's kind of silly of me not to just do it. Yeah, I do like how you're essentially also trying to build momentum here. Where you're getting into your groove, you're finding your rhythm and people don't understand that intent and rhythm are so important to develop that momentum. Yeah, yeah, you have to set yourself up for success. And I think I'm lucky enough to have some really good mentors. Obviously my dad and my strength coach from high school and my basketball coach. Some people have to learn on their own or you learn from other lifters or lifting coaches, whatever. But yeah, you learn the process of kind of like, it's the same idea as an RPE eight or nine. Why not go to 10? It's probably not because you're gonna fry your CNS, although it may cause a little more fatigue. It's more so just so you have room to grow within the following four weeks. If you're just hitting an RPE 10s all the time, I'm just gonna bench 315 for singles all the time. Never make progress, which physically, you may be able to make some progress that way, but there's, human is quite complex. So we have to worry about kind of our emotional side. And look at this big devil. This is the highlight real right here. We got Filipino thunder. We got 700 pounds of twisted steel. I think it's about 650, seven, five is next. Marcus is the old training partner of mine. If you guys don't know, a really good friend of mine. And he started a physical labor job. So this dude's been really, really tired. One hasn't competed in a while. Just all of us, we've lifted for so long and we have things to worry about. But he's back in the gym a little bit, working a lot of construction and really focusing in on his squat.  And that's why we went a little bit earlier to the gym to get some side spotters. And it is something about community. And that's why it's always fun when Omar's here and we can train with Allen and everybody. But you don't always have that. And me and Marcus had that for many years together. And we still do here and there schedules. We just get busy and old. But he wanted to squash 705. And I think he smashed it and I hope we have footage right here for that. Yeah. And I think it speaks volumes, the camaraderie, the fact that we're willing to leave the house at 9 a.m. to go there. 8.45 actually is what we left. On the weekend. Yeah. Just sleeping day, Marcus. You will never catch me do that when it's on my own. It's called the noon wake up at the minimum, train at 3 p.m. Why do you think I don't get a tan? Because you're only inside during the sun out. Oh yeah, I'm probably asleep when the sun's out. Don't blame me. Don't blame me. More footage coming. We've got a full day of eating coming soon. Yeah. Omar's strong man footage, maybe coming soon on your channel. Yes. Maybe we'll go to Toronto this year. We'll see. I'm pretty lazy. Maybe he'll come back down this year. He is also lazy. But we appreciate you. I'll be back. OK. Oh, I'll be back. I do want to go to Toronto. It's way too cold. And I got too many projects here. But it'll probably happen. Appreciate you guys. Omar Esau. Silent Mike. Catch you in the next one.