Hi. Hello everyone. I'm Larissa. I'm a computer scientist in Adobe Experience Platform. I've mostly been developing backend services, but I've always had an interest in automation and making it easier for developers to fail through CI CD. Yeah. And I'm Yonuts. I'm a senior computer scientist. I work for Adobe Experience Platform. I've been mostly helping teams build reliable services. And I think a big part of that has been to build these robust CD pipelines. Our talk today is about advanced deployment pipelines with ARGO, precisely with ARGO CD, ARGO rollouts, ARGO workflows, and events. I noticed that all presenters were kind of advertising their talk with what components of ARGO CD, of ARGO they are using, so we are using all of them. So let's get started. At Adobe, the journey towards continuous deployment started with us deploying in messes clusters with some homegrown deployment tools. Then with the embracement of Kubernetes, teams could get direct access to clusters and basically leverage the full power of it. And they started bringing their own tools and maintaining them, such as Spinnaker and Ansible. And we've been Spinnaker users for a while. We've been building over and over for lots of projects, continuous deployment pipelines to deploy to production in a safe, quick and recoverable manner. But today to reduce this technology sprawl and to also concentrate the effort on a single CI CD platform, Adobe is making the switch to Kubernetes native patterns and tools such as GitOps and ARGO. So we targeted to move our robust and thoroughly tested pipelines with Spinnaker to ARGO. And why did we do that and why didn't we reduce that technology sprawl to Spinnaker only? Well, Kubernetes native and GitOps tool has many advantages over Spinnaker. And the move to ARGO was backed up by things like deployment drift. With Spinnaker, your deployment can drift away from the Git state. Your source of truth of what's running in production is somewhere between your last Spinnaker logs and what your users might have done in the meantime, as opposed to a GitOps tool which would reapply the Git state whenever a drift is detected. There's also a learning curve with Spinnaker. There is application code. There is Kubernetes code. And there's also Spinnaker-specific language while developing on top of ARGO is just writing Kubernetes manifest. And we also bumped into bugs with Spinnaker because Spinnaker steps are hard to test, whereas ARGO workflows boils down to code that runs into containers and can be easily isolated and tested. But the move to ARGO wasn't without these challenges. And the main ones were no promotion out of the box, no rollback out of the box. And what about deployment configuration changes? Nobody is really talking about them. Should they be handled by the GitOps controller only, or should they be handled through some kind of pipeline? Let's talk about the first one, promotion. First, it's important to say that we are doing trunk-based development. We have a single, long-lived branch called Main. That, of course, with GitOps implies that we are handling environments as directories and deployments, thanks, are reduced to ARGO CD thinking only the main branch. Here you can see the file hierarchy of what we have. Each path maps to a Kubernetes namespace and has the configuration files for a particular environment and region. Also, irrespective of the deployment tool we use, we always promote our changes through environments. In our branch environment, we do some tests or health checks to start to gain confidence in our release candidate. And we first deploy to dev, then to stage in the end to prod, stopping the line if something fails and rolling back all the previous environments. If environments are directories in the main branch, promotion comes down to orchestrating commits between GitPaths. And although there is no promotion out of the box with ARGO CD, you can easily do that and you have the building blocks to do that with ARGO workflows. And the solution we came up with is this workflow you see right here where you can have the CI as part of the workflow if you want, or you can have the CI triggering this workflow right here through ARGO events. But the promotion starts, of course, with the first environment, which will just go and update the container image tag with the newly built one from the CI step. But it will update that only in the dev GitPath, and it will commit those changes to the main branch. Then the workflow runs in sync step that will go and deploy these changes in dev. And as part of the sync, we also run some acceptance tests, and we run them post-deployment in a post-sync hook. And afterwards, the workflow also sends some notification via Slack regarding the status of the deployment. And we do that for the rest of the environments as well. The end result is what you see in the right of the screen, some commits for every environment and region. The important thing to notice here, and I'll come back to this shortly, is that we stamp each commit with the workflow UID. But what happens if something goes wrong, if the tests are failing or the deployment fails? Well, you most likely would want to recover as fast as possible from that to minimize the impact, and watch faster than automating some rollback. So what we do is, in an exit handler, we revert all the commits, all the deployment commits from the current workflow run. And in the right of the screen, you can see some code of this exit handler that will run if the workflow failed, and it will run the template revert commit. And what the revert commit does is this script right here. It will first fetch all the commits performed by the current workflow. By that workflow UID I was talking earlier. Then it will just take them one by one and revert them and push those changes to the main branch. And the end result is what you see in the right of the screen as most as like some compensated commits for all the deployment commits from the current workflow run. Now, the third challenge. What about deployment configuration changes? So far we saw that we are validating application code. Remember I said that when we are promoting a change, we are updating only the image tag, basically. But what about deployment changes? Well, the practice with GitOps, I think, is developers just go and edit those files in the Git state directly and have the GitOps controller sync them. If some kind of promotion is required, developers need to do that themselves by first merging the change to dev, then to stage and so on. And if something fails in this process, the rollbacks are in the responsibility of the developer as well. And if there are multiple edits in a short time, it becomes even more of a challenge. So the solution we came up with is have the developers edit and do this modification in some other place in the first place. They can change application code deployment configuration for all environments in a single commit and have those changes be promoted by an Argo workflow, which of course it will roll back the changes if something goes wrong. And let's see how the promote steps changes in this case to account for deployment configuration changes. So for each environment region, we first want to copy the recently edited manifest by the developer into the Git state and then continue with what we did for application code, update the image tag and commit those changes to Git. Thanks. So we saw why we migrated from Spinnaker to Argo and we also looked at some of the challenges that we met along the way adopting Argo. Now let's talk a bit about some patterns. So here's the thing. I think that you probably are familiar with this trying to build this automated pipeline that takes you from dev to stage production and it's really a balancing act. It has to be fast. You don't want your developers to wait. It has to be stable. You don't want for failures to occur for no reason. And it has to be safe. Like you have to make those changes and make sure that whatever you just change gets to production in a good order. Let's talk a bit about some of the patterns that we use. The first thing we use or the first pattern that we've been testing for a few years now is something that I've seen other people use as well is we take every change that goes into a PR and we deploy it into a dedicated environment for that PR. And these PR environments are isolated or semi-isolated. I guess it depends on the service and the dependencies and how easy it is for us to set it up. What happens is that whenever a PR gets open, what we do is there's a provisioning flow happening that just spawns up this new namespace dedicated for that PR, maybe provision some secrets, create a dedicated ARGO application that is also committed to get and also maybe create some DNS entries. And once that happens is that whenever we have changes happening in that PR, so whenever a developer goes in and makes an update, we deploy that code automatically in that environment and finally we also run tests, like we run functional tests afterwards. So what this does, what this helps us do is actually continuously validate the changes that go into PR before we even consider merging that code to main. That means that we drastically reduce the amount of bugs and failures that we see in the main branch. Second thing that we have to ask ourselves is, okay, but what about impact? Like, we diminish the risk per failure, but what about the impact of failure? In some of the cases where, let's say, maybe the functional test don't catch a problem or maybe there's a failure which just is so deeply rooted that only appears after running for hours and so on. Well, we have a particular problem, let's say, in experienced platform. There's a network of services, mostly for data collection that are deployed across the globe. Today we have seven regions. And whenever, you know, we would, if we were ever to try to do a simultaneous rollout across the globe, then any kind of failure would have a great impact on our users and eventually on our business. So what we do is we use wave deployments. And this is, just like the name suggests, this is about splitting your production deployments into multiple waves. So we start with, let's say, a smaller region where we deploy that region to production. We let it bake for a bit. And if everything checks out, then we proceed to the next waves and so on until we have deployed to all regions. And this is all done using our workflows and the DAG. It's nothing very complicated in the end. The only thing that I would like to add there is that some teams, it all depends on the, I guess, the requirements, some teams actually have a wave zero where they deploy to a dark launch environment. Most of them call it pre-prod. And it's called pre-prod because it's actually identical to production in terms of configuration and deployment configuration. However, it doesn't really get any customer traffic. Like it doesn't really get any real traffic. It just uses, it gets synthetic traffic and then it's also used for testing. So we use that before we actually even deploy to any real users to the code. That's all great. But what about at the deployment level itself? Like how do you make sure that the deployment is doing okay? And probably some of you, or maybe most of you are using our rollouts and there are some very standard way of doing that. Like you can use analysis on a rollout based on Prometheus metrics. At least that's what we do. Prometheus is quite standard at Adobe. We use it to monitor just about anything. You can also do, sorry about that. You can also do a man-widen analysis which is basically a statistical analysis using confidence intervals. It actually can tell you if there's a significant degradation between a baseline version of your application and the Canary application, basically what you're trying to roll out. And this is very useful if you have multiple things you're looking at and using Prometheus analysis just doesn't cut it out. So if you're considering business metrics, like maybe you're looking at success rate or latency, but if you're also looking into how your application is doing, like you want to look at JVM memory or maybe you're looking at, I don't know, CPU usage or other indicators, then you probably want to do this kind of analysis. And finally, another pattern is using tests as a rollout gate. And I just want to go a bit into this one.  And the purpose of the job is just to run functional tests. And then we create an experiment. And in this experiment, of course, it has to run against the version of the service we're trying to roll out. And the experiment just uses the analysis that we just defined, so it basically runs the functional tests. And finally, in the rollout, you can, sorry, you can roll out and use the experiment as the first step, so it actually gates the rollout on the result of the experiment. And what this does is if the tests fail and the analysis fails, the experiment fails, and therefore the rollout will not happen. But if the test succeeds, then the analysis succeeds, the experiment succeeds, and the rollout will proceed. So it's basically a way of pushing the execution of functional tests prior to the cannery actually getting any kind of user traffic. So it really helps us to further diminish the risk of failure. And finally, you probably notice that we've been talking a lot about continuous deployments or this model, because that's what we've been using for a few years now. It has really helped us. And it's fine, but at the same time, we do realize that in some cases maybe continuous deployments is really not the answer for everything. On one thing, what we notice is that continuous deployments typically equate synchronous workflows. You have to take each commit and promote it from dev to stage to prod and so on and so on. So this becomes a problem in some cases. If you have a large team working on a repo and maybe you have a high number of changes, maybe you have a slow rollout to production in order to minimize risk, or maybe you just have a long deployment time for whatever reason and you can't drastically reduce it. These are all actual use cases from Adobe as well. And it becomes problematic because if you use these sort of synchronous workflows, then your developers will have to sort of wait for older changes to be deployed until their new changes are deployed. A second perspective is that of the business because here's the thing. I think some organizations, some groups are, and I think they're rightfully, so maybe they're afraid of continuous deployments because with continuous deployments, you no longer control what gets released and when. You just release every change once it's in main, you push it to production. And sometimes that really doesn't, maybe it doesn't work for anyone, for everyone. And in that case, if you want to make releases as a business decision, so basically decide exactly when you want to release a piece of code, then maybe continuous delivery is probably a better model for you and for us. So how do we do this? Well, it's pretty simple really. We basically split the deployment workflow into, we have the main deployment workflow which pushes the code all the way to lower level environments like dev or stage or, you know, for teams which use pre-prod to pre-prod. And then there's a second workflow which actually looks at the state of the code into that last environment like stage or pre-prod and takes the application version from there and pushes it to production. And these are two different workflows. The second one, you can actually trigger it by hand like manually or maybe it runs on a schedule. And the difference is if you want to have an actual release as a button, then you'll want to trigger it manually. But if you are just plagued by the problem of having too many commits and queuing, then maybe you just want to release on a schedule. Like maybe you want to release every three hours or once a day or maybe once a week. I guess it depends. This is what it looks like. You can see how this workflow actually spans into two ones per pair of environment and region. And here it's looking for the application version in the previous environment, then promotes it and waits for the Argo CD application to be synced and healthy. And finally, besides the pros and cons, I guess one or two other things I would like to add. I think that if you're using these synchronous commit promotions and continuous deployments, what you can do is even extend it to in case of failure and in case of rollbacks, you can actually extend it to rollback the code that was pushing the application repository and that caused the failure. That's one thing. And a second thing is that if you're using continuous delivery and you're using these asynchronous state promotions, like you deploy from time to time from stage or preprot to production, then because you're pushing more changes, you're pushing one to 10 commits. If you're pushing all of those to production at once and you have a failure, you will have a bit of a harder time to figure out what a commit was really the problem. So just to do a quick recap, what we noticed really early on when trying to or adopting Argo was that we needed to create promotion and rollback and bake it into our workflows. Two, that we feel that you have to take the deployment configuration changes through the same diligence and process as the application code changes. Three, that PR preview environments are really helpful. They're pretty easy to set up and they help you to identify and resolve failures long before they are even reaching the main branch. Fourth, that wave deployments can actually help you minimize the impact of eventual failures in your production rollouts. And five, that you can use progressive deployments in very standard ways, like Argo rollouts is, I really like the documentation, is really well documented. You can use analysis pretty easily and you can use that to sort of easily rollout changes to your users. And finally, that asynchronous tape promotions are sometimes a good way to mitigate the problem of continuous deployments. And with that, I think we're through with our presentation. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, we're now open.


So the title of this video is if he does this then he's a man who lies and I'm actually going to be reviewing the golden bachelor once again because some new things surfaced about Gary or Jerry or whatever his name is by the way isn't that a lie right now first off he spells his name G E R R Y I'm sorry that's Jerry it's not Gary and that to me is number one lie no I'm just kidding but it's something that frustrates me or frustrated me and I don't know if anyone else that felt the same but there's some new things that have surfaced about him that kind of relates to the midlife demographic if you will of how people either lie or exaggerate things about themselves to make themselves look good so let's get into a first a couple things about Gary and now he claimed he was a restaurant tour restaurant tour by the way folks let me rewind for a second I'm in a real I'm going to give you some examples of how a man you might be able to catch a man in a lie so sitting you know I'm going to give a few examples in just a few minutes so stick around for a second but he he claimed coming back to Gary that he was a restaurant tour well it turns out now now that the show is over that he earned or owned a burger joint for a small period of time so I'm kind of and he also was a handyman he did some odd jobs he was a manager at I don't know some place I don't recall the particulars but I suspect when he or his children were filling out the application for the bachelor they thought it might sound more impressive if you put down restaurant tour like he owns spagos or a Wolfgang Puck restaurant or mastros just to name a few right well no he owned a burger joint so you know is that a lie no it's a restaurant certainly he could call himself a restaurant tour but I certainly believe that there are many instances where men and women exaggerate things about themselves I think we see this frequently when it comes to someone's height okay a man is five foot seven and he puts six foot six foot down on his dating app well because he knows that he's going to be rejected based on height now obviously when you get to meet the person in person that's going to come out but I think there are some natural things that people do are not natural things to do but things that people have done to to avoid being rejected certainly height is one of them and for women it's body type you know I don't I don't know how many times I've heard a person well it's a you know muscle weighs more than fat okay well I'm sorry you know what then you can't put slim as a body type when you are probably extra curvy or a volumptuous just to begin with I think putting down slim and so men and women tend to lie the biggest lie that happens in the dating world happens to be someone's age this is mostly for folks that are in midlife they will they will fudge their age because again we're being rejected in this capacity and we can spend hours debating whether or not this is a lie or fudging or not I think what came out of the golden bachelor since he has announced a couple things have come out particularly when he he according to Leslie he lied to her about his feelings and we're going to talk about that for a moment but it's also surface that he wasn't quite as truthful when asked a few questions related to his past experiences now the way he kind of established himself I've been celibate and single since my wife passed away six or seven years ago you know in other words I haven't kissed another woman well it's come to surface now that he actually has had several women since his wife passed away and even as early as within months after his wife passing away and he even had a relationship that lasted I believe over a year and I believe that this person even lived with him so certainly I don't know what he told the producers early on but to make himself look like a saint he most likely exaggerated substantially or omitted information about himself so is that a lie to omit information well I think if you're trying to deceive then I think that is fits into the category of lying even if it's an omission to some degree because it's going to come out it's like that five foot seven person that says there's you know okay let's maybe make them say that they're 511 instead of six foot you know it's going to come out these things are going to come out now what's interesting is the the what he shared with Leslie in particular about his feelings about her now he expressed strong feelings from what we understand in the fantasy sweet making her believe that she was going to be the one picked that she was going to be the one picked now we don't know because all we know is her side of the story and I suspect he probably did have feelings for her he genuinely genuinely genuinely liked her had feelings for her so was he misrepresenting his feelings you see this is where it gets kind of tricky because feelings aren't a statement of fact okay how you feel about someone isn't a statement of fact how I feel about you it's just a feeling feelings aren't facts now if he goes on to say that he clearly said I'm going to pick you and then he chose to pick Teresa well then that's a down and out lie but if he just said I feel really strongly for you I think you could be the one if there was some prefacing of it you could be the one I think you're the one then that's not a statement of fact okay so now what's interesting about Leslie is she is throwing him under the bus publicly I mean I think you know hell happened no fury like a woman scorned and what's interesting this plays into her pathology of being hurt frequently in her past relationship she expanded and exposed so much about about how she has been hurt and guess what happened she manifested that so ladies I want you to think about this if you have a narrative that says I've been hurt I've been hurt I've been hurt guess what you most likely will attract that and again it's time to shift the narrative instead of less yes you may have been hurt in the past but you don't need to talk about it anymore you know personally you know whether he loved bombed her or not you know I have to believe that being in that kind of environment that was probably kind of tough it's kind of similar to our current dating environment where people are dating multiple people you can have feelings for multiple people to the extent that we love bomb well that's love bombing for some is just excitement it's enthusiasm it's not necessarily intentional to deceive with someone and yet there are times where you know and I speak from personal experience I have been incredibly exaggerated my feelings because I was in a state of lust or limerence we call this love bombing as if it's a bad thing no it's just enthusiasm in some cases now for some people there's a manipulation involved to get someone in bed or maybe to take them for their money that sort of thing but it's just a natural human feeling when we have dopamine being dripped from our brain into our bodies you know we can act like idiots men and women alike you ladies are no picnic either I've seen you chase men you know you've you've literally hunted them down you know someone who wasn't giving you know someone who wasn't giving you the time of day so this isn't singular to one gender okay now I would have preferred that Leslie take the high road and not get into the weeds that's just my personal opinion for her benefit not for anyone else's benefit not for his benefit for her benefit because now she's swimming in this narrative and I think while some men will find her appealing I don't think I'm just speculating here I truly wonder if she's healed her wounds from her past relationships and so rather than going on the defensive with him and talking about it incessantly on the talk shows I'm more of a proponent of you know praise in public you know criticize in private okay that's just my perception anyway so what are some of the ways men and women lie to each other well I think one of the ways of lying is by omission by being ultra vague you know when Gary was asked when was the time you when was the last time you slept with someone you know I mean did you notice he really he he evaded it by being vague now maybe they cut it out that's the prop the part of the challenge that we have is we don't know what they did in the editing room but I certainly think when someone is vague particularly about their past their vague about their present life they are usually hiding something and if someone's hiding something then there's a good chance they are lying to you now that doesn't mean you have a right to know every human being secret so there are times where you might be asked a question that a person may not feel comfortable sharing that with you but you know rather than being vague I'm a big proponent saying you know I don't feel comfortable sharing that with you just yet until we've built a level of trust with one another so being vague now another way to determine if someone's lying is where their stories don't add up you know they they mentioned they went to college 20 years ago and then you go on their LinkedIn and there's no you know like there's no college you know aspect of it on their resume listed on their you know their LinkedIn resume I'm just giving that as an example maybe their professional capacity coming back to Gary who said he was a rust restaurant tour when he owned a burger joint and some of his other professions when their stories don't add up that's usually a good sign that this is a man who's lying now I also think when when something seems too good to be true did any of you watch the Netflix special called bad doctor bad doctor you've got to watch it it's a three part series but this guy was a full on bullshit artist okay he was supposed to be this renowned doctor and sadly a lot of people were playing into like some of the the the hospitals he were involved in were actually contributing to his lies okay but if something is sounds too good to be true you know there's a good chance there could be a level of lying within this person and we find out later that this guy was living a completely different live theme and head well I don't want to spoil it for you it's called bad doctor check it out on Netflix now another form of this is a real this is an aspect of lying when a person is very busy you know it fascinates me how many men will enter into the early stages of dating and they've got all the time in the world to invest in you they have all the time in the world until they have sex with you and then isn't it fascinating that all of their problems begin to surface and they don't have time it's like problem after problem after problem and that becomes their excuse so when someone seems too busy after a while that's just in my opinion a bullshit excuse for I'm just not that into you anymore you know another form of lying and I'm kind of guilty of what I'm about to say is TMI now someone who gives too much information and I'm guilty of this so I don't want to necessarily classify myself as a liar but I have a habit of wearing my heart on my sleeve but again when it seems excessive when it seems exaggerated when it seems just almost overwhelming that's a person that's probably hiding something within like they've they've got the lie the needle in this haystack of TMI that they're hiding something within there versus someone like myself that has a propensity of just getting a little over exaggerated and sometimes I share without a filter it's a it's a fault of mine to some degree I'm not proud of it but I'm aware that sometimes I don't necessarily have a great filter oh another way to spot someone who could possibly be lying is somebody who refuses to give you personal information about themselves they were they are coming back to the avoidance or vague but they almost refuse to give you personal information they they avoid it and they actually tried to sidestep all personal information you know again people that are secretive will do this because they have something to hide and someone has something to hide they are usually lying in this moment now I want to come back to exaggeration because there's different forms of exaggeration let me give you an example okay again I'm going to share something personal I'm going to out myself but professionally professionally I call myself a me America's leading midlife dating and relationship coach now this was a self proclaimed you know title now do I happen to be in a you know fairly top tier yes am I the leading person no I'm not I say America's leading I mean I'm saying that there's more than one out there is this an exaggeration well you know what maybe maybe I'll own it you know but it's also to give a little bit of context to where I devote most of my energies is focusing on midlife and now that I have progressed into a fairly large following on YouTube I think I can fit into those shoes fairly easily now with that said I took on that moniker years ago because sometimes we have to act as if we have to act as if in other words we put out that energy because it's something we want to step into I'm talking about real deception I'm talking about deceiving someone to convince them to like you to be with you to spend time with you or to sleep with you and we have to be mindful that when you're meeting total strangers and again in this world of in our current dating environment when you're meeting total strangers you know nothing about them it requires more time to do your due diligence then just haphazardly give your heart to a total stranger this is why I created my dating vows by the way folks there's a link below to get what's called my dating vows I've talked about this if you need me to talk about again I will but it's a way to get clarity my whole coaching practice is by the way here's a link right here to schedule a discovery call with me to see if working with the coaches right for you there's a link below in the description as well to get all my different gifts and that sort of thing is that being discerning is an important quality for for for actually inviting in your ideal partner because we're swimming in a sea of a lot of dysfunctionality a lot of humans that don't necessarily intentionally lie but they find themselves like in this Gary case most likely a byproduct of a lot of unresolved issues in their lives I guarantee you Gary the pride of ABC's golden bachelor has his issues and they will spin this in their favor because they're here to make money but the reality is is we all have a few skeletons in our closet myself included we all do so so we have to recognize that you know we're not 100% truthful to everybody until you built real trust with another person and last but not least I just want to share this one piece before we move on and that is when someone gets super defensive with you they again most likely they're hiding something from you so if in the early stages someone gets super defensive there's a good chance they could be hiding something and when someone's hiding something they're usually lying in this boat moment is this thinking is this resonating please let me know in fact if it is I'd like you to post a comment below I'd like to hear your thoughts if you found value in this conversation please hit that like button please share this video please subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell so you can be notified of new videos and live streams as well alright those who know my format if you have a question write the word question then post the question there after or you can see that little dollar sign the chat box you can hit that super sticker super chat all the money's from the super sticker super chat goes to a scholarship fund in the name of my son Connor Asley that's salty right there it's my son who passed away over five years ago and in his honor we donate to Hoffman process insight also defray the cost for those who can't afford all of the coaching that when someone works with me so again hit that little dollar sign our goal tonight is $50 so let's collect $50 for the Connor Asley scholarship fund and also if you want to join the hot seat click that link that I just posted right there alright I saw that and that has posted a question do you think a guy who's falling in love with me but then tells me in a text before calling is a sign of deception he says being on the phone at length is a form of manipulation I don't understand this question do you think a guy who's falling in love with me but then tells me to text before calling you know what okay so I actually like when people text ahead of time I just I just something well okay so first off when my son calls me out of the blue I go into panic mode I'm like oh fucking God is he in a car accident is he in jail is something wrong mainly because I'm just used to him texting me so when I get a phone call these days I'm almost used to pre just sending a text message as a precursor to create a conversation so it can turn into a phone call so I don't think that could be a sign of deception however if you've never been to his home if you've never been to his home it could be a sign of deception okay but if you've been to his home I highly doubt it but in that I love that question thank you so much for jumping in and sharing it by the way I want to give a net some props for the $5 super sticker and Margaret for the $15 super sticker so we are $30 away from our goal thanks for the love we really appreciate it Margaret and Annette Leslie wants to share with us oh my God the story about Golden Bachelor treating his live living girlfriend the way he allegedly did not so golden yeah that's why I thought I'd do this live topic today Deborah wants to go on to say super defensive when I discovered after 16 months together he had a honey on the side oh I'm so sorry to hear that this is why I'm a big proponent of relationships where you're spending two or three days and nights a week together doing shared activities hobbies mutual interest spending time with family and friends traveling together teamwork building skills both in your personal and professional life intimacy both physical and emotional intimacy that leads either moving in together getting married but Jonathan I'm in a long distance relationship well this is by the way you could be in a 16 month and I don't know if that's the case 16 month long distance relationship and someone could have five honeys on the side so anyway Leafs jumps in folks I cannot I cannot do to dedicated focus wait folks I cannot do to dedicated focus two nights in a row and hit $50 will be $100 once Jonathan gets his 50 Leafs I love you I just want to give you props she is a member she is a member listen folks if you want to join the membership program and YouTube I give a separate shout out for those that are members we do some occasional member special members videos that sort of thing so I want to give some props and love to Leafs who's a member of the YouTube membership program you just hit that link right below the video to join the membership Judy's in the house is he more likely to be an outlook alcoholic to lie if he is yeah I think it was a lot of people probably don't even know they're an alcoholic they are they probably gaslight themselves so I think that that if they lie to themselves then they will probably hide their disease I think I don't know if alcoholism is a disease I've heard it is I'm not an expert in this field so I think people Judy lied to themselves about see think about an alcoholic is suffering on the inside someone who needs to consume a lot of alcohol to either get a buzz to feel good or to numb the pain you know I I recognize that we are here in the United States there is an epidemic of emotional emotional health issues I mean we have a significant epidemic this is why the pharmaceutical industry is a trillion dollar industry here in the United States I don't think it's a billion dollar I think it's a trillion dollar industry alcohol is alcohol and drugs are a trillion dollar industry because humans are suffering and so you know I have a lot of compassion for people I'm not necessarily you know honor their choices I'm not here to validate their choices but I certainly am empathetic to the pain someone might be feeling if they need alcohol or drugs to circumvent the pain that they're feeling that's just my two cents on that one G is in the house I inadvertently texted a friend about a guy I have been seeing but I inadvertently sent it to him it was about him going with another woman and how it feeds his ego well I wonder from a spiritual perspective why you might have done that so tell us more we want to hear what's by the way why don't you join the hot seat here's a link to join the hot seat why don't you join us live and let's talk about this one this might be a really good juicy one to talk about because I need I have a lot of questions on this one okay alright oh we're going to get into personal questions you guys are welcome to ask personal questions didn't you recently go to a singles event just wondering how it was yes I was invited to Julie Ferman's singles event she is a matchmaker called Cupid's coach someone write Cupid's coach in the box and this was a couple weeks ago there was about 25 men 25 women roughly about the equal balance was for people 50 and older I think it was like the age at the average age was 55 to 65 some 70 year olds were there and it turns out I was recognized by a few people I was even recognized by a woman that we interacted on a dating site that was kind of fun well for me personally there wasn't a love connection I gotta tell you there was a couple there I'm looking at the two of them and I'm like you two need to get a room they really hit it off I mean they were all over each other I think some people walked away with telephone numbers I certainly I certainly I actually got the number of two women this isn't probably romance romantic romantic but I feel like I made a couple new friends so yes I did go to that and it was a lot of fun so thanks for bringing that up hey Alice just gave us a $4 $5 super sticker so that's we're $25 away from our goal or $25 away from our goal so thanks for the love really appreciate Gary went to looking for a sugar mama I keep hearing that I don't need I don't know if that's the case hey I want to just give props to hold on a second hey we just had G joined the group thanks for the love she just just became a member of the YouTube group by the way there's a link below if you can join for as little as a couple bucks a month so thanks so much and Leafs just wants to remind us of Cupid's coach exactly and Alayna's in the house hey welcome I do recognize you folks okay so I just want you know I keep by the way come on G join the hot seat we need to talk about your story again okay let's keep going here Alice says the last man I dated I learned quickly that he had a problem with alcohol it didn't necessarily make him lie but he was definitely inconsistent couldn't work I get that a lot of people are in pain they use alcohol to numb their pain that's just sad um prior relationship Gina I don't know what your question is you're going to have to put it down but Arlene's in the house I was going out with a guy five or six times I felt something was off he said that no one has been to his apartment even his daughters why would he say that he missed the second income why would he say that he missed the second income yeah you know folks by the way rule now you know rule number 14 a roots rule number 14 a you must visit a man's home before you give your heart to somebody but Jonathan he has a lot of excuses why I can't go there he lives thousands of miles away and he always comes to me or he lives hundreds of miles away and he always comes to me you have to go to his home he's not real until you've been inside his home okay just like you're not real unless he's been inside your home rule number 14 a I just made up that rule Margaret wants to know how do I join your YouTube group it's right below the video there's a place that says membership you click that button Cecilia's in the house when I complain to friends about a guy they tend to gaslight me what's better than complaining to a friend about a particular guy see I'm not a big proponent of complaining complaining oftentimes comes with it victim consciousness I certainly do believe that you can share you can vent I mean there's nothing wrong with venting okay to get it out but with the vent you also have to have a resolution if it's just a vomit because you want to point the finger at someone just remember if you're not taking ownership on your part then it's complaining venting is getting it out and then taking ownership in your part of the equation that's absolutely okay in my book otherwise you're in victim consciousness in my book you can disagree with me but that's just my perception hmm alright G is in the house I love the bravery you know I'm gonna be tough on you I am not I'm gonna be loving so why don't you tell the story again to remind everybody what you shared did you hear me yeah it's kind of like okay I'll just talk I don't know if it seems like yeah okay tell us tell us the question again okay okay what I did was I was texting a friend about this guy I've been seeing yeah okay the question was okay I was texting a friend about a guy I was seeing and I inadvertently in the text yes okay so tell us what happened next okay did he respond yes we love juicy juicy stuff this is what I said this is what he does okay um let's hurry okay I'm looking forward it was really bad um so this was a text message you sent to a man by mistake telling him you thought you were sending it to your girlfriend you were telling him that he had ego issues blah blah blah and the text went to him so everyone that's watching she's looking for the text I deleted it from his thing thinking that he wouldn't see it but But then I told him, I told him, I told him, oh no, he won't have like two minutes to believe him. Okay, so what did he say? He came over my house within half hour after I sent him. He didn't explain anything. Okay, well wait, time out, jeez. So he came to your house, okay. He came to your house. What did he say to you at your house? He said that he left his house, and he went off and he drifted. Wait, say that again, because you're muffled. He came over my house and he said that he couldn't find his drill and he remembered he left it at my house. Okay, all right, so what happened next? By the way, can you just go from memory? By the way, just stop doing the looking for it. Go from memory here, okay? No, I know, but I'm talking, and then I just go from memory. All right, look in the camera. All right, he put some windows in my house and he was over one day and he was looking at his text. Okay, all right. All right, time out, time out. Once again, jeez, let's stick. This is like dragnet. Stick to the facts. What did he say when you talked to him? What did he say about the text to you, okay? By the way, ladies who are watching this, this is an example.  This is where men appreciate direct conversation. So be direct with me right now. What did he do or say about the text message? He didn't, I didn't know I sent it. I still feel thought I sent it to my friend and I hear my doorbell ringing and he never comes over, I'm now. So I answered the call and I'm like, you know, why is he here? And he said, oh, I forgot a tool. He needed his drill, which was a garage. So he went in the garage and then he's talked about some of the problems for God, his tool, and he got some stuff and he was giving me a hug and he said, well, I'll probably stop by when I'm done working. And I didn't really think anything of it. And then I thought about it, like, what if I'm getting a full four o'clock in the afternoon, if he had been there all day? But what if I don't use the drill? Well, let me ask you a different question. Time out. Where did the two of you stand right now? He came over the last night because this just happened a week ago. Okay, but where do you, the two of you stand right now? He doesn't wanna talk about it, I know he read it. Okay. All right, so let me ask you a question since you're on with the drill. Okay, so you get a chance to ask a dating and relationship coach question. I charge a lot of money for this. So do you have a question for me? Yeah, I didn't.  I know that, he's always been a big slut. But he doesn't know I know him. He doesn't know what? He doesn't, wait, wait.   Yeah, he's like 15 years old. Okay, so he sleeps with lots of women. Are you, and now is he currently? At least he did. I mean, I don't, at least he did. Well, Gigi says he should be the next golden bachelor. So. Well he's 15 years younger than I am. So that's kind of why I charge a lot of money. Okay, so, okay. By the way, I misread that. She said Gigi should be the next golden bachelor at. I apologize, I misread that. No, but I feel like going with old one is how I get on with Gigi, I think it's horrible. So let me ask you a question. Do you like this guy? Yeah, I like him a lot. Does he like you? I think he does now. Are you guys in a fully committed relationship? Are you two in a fully committed? He's in a lot of relationship, there's no commitment.  No, he's been over like once a week for the last year.  So you two are what's known in what's known as a situation ship. A situation ship means, or really what you are is friends with benefits. That's the category we would put the two of you in. So let me ask you, is that what you desire in your life as a friends with benefits or do you want something more? I'd like more, but I know it's not feasible or possible to be in someone. Okay, okay. I don't want to be committed. Okay, well here's the thing. Most of my audience here, and by the way, I'm gonna use you as an example right now. Most everybody here is seeking a significant relationship. Now in many cases, I think some people, well, hear me out. Some people have resigned themselves to go, I won't be able to get a significant relationship. So I'm okay with a friends with benefits type of dynamic, particularly with a younger man, because it's could be less drama with a younger man or it might be more drama with a younger man. Who knows? You have to do what's right for you. If this is right for you, then that's okay. You know, the fact that you inadvertently sent this text message and he avoided dealing with it, he might have felt embarrassed reading what you wrote and he rather not discuss it because it's a rather embarrassing thing to have somebody you like judge you in that way. And it's not fun to feel judged. So he's most likely stuffing or avoiding his feelings in this place of being judged. Pardon me? I wish I could find some text I sent him. By the way, power G says this sounds like high school drama. I know, it's weird, that's what my friend said, but I didn't insult him. All right, well, listen, G, thank you for being on. I want to open this up. I want to open this up. My question was, I didn't, I know that he never knew that I knew that he was a big threat. I got that, so what's your question? Well, now he, I don't want him to feel with him. I don't want him to think. So I want you to one more time. I'm going to keep asking you, what's your question? What should I say when she wants to point out, well, I'm going to see how the question is built. That's all I'm saying, old guys. So he doesn't think I'm like, will hook for me? Because I don't want him to- All right, well, the thing is, the two of you should have a grown-up conversation about the status of your relationship. That's advice number one, have a grown-up conversation about what the status of our relationship is. If your status is a situation ship or friends with benefits, then you have every right to say, or to just let him know that you're going to be out looking for something more serious. This is the grown-up way of having conversations, not the high school way of having conversations. Okay? Well, listen, I want to open up the floor for anyone else that wants to join us. Tee, I'm giving you- Thank you, it was fun. I like it. Oh, you're very welcome. Giving you a lot of love, giving you a big, gigantic Jot and Bear hug. Okay? Thank you. Hi. Thanks.  When you're speaking to a man and he says, ask me a question. We don't want to know the backstory, okay? We men want, it's like that TV show, Dragonet. Just the facts, ma'am. Women have a propensity of sharing the story. And as if some people say, there might be a lot of drama in the story. And I'm not throwing G under the bus per se. I'm just using her as an example. By the way, G, I'm giving you a lot of love right now. I think it takes a lot of courage to get up and share. I also think in this particular case with him, you might find yourself in a dynamic, like I said, it's just friends with benefits. So if that's all that is, then have a grown-up conversation. And that's the second piece. Ladies, many of you are silent. Grown-up conversations mean you talk like grown-ups. Hey, I noticed that we don't, in this particular dynamic, we don't really have defined our relationship. Let's have, can we have a conversation about the status of our relationship so I can have some clarity? That is a grown-up way of doing things, okay? So that's my suggestion for you all. And just like Leaf said, just the facts like going to court, exactly. All right, let's see what else we have here.  It's so much better. Now, I guess I could be confused in my videos of rambling on, but there's a mission to my madness of what I do because this is my curated forum. It's not a conversation per se. When you're having a conversation with a human being, it's very important to be clear in your communication because context and clarity makes it easier for the person to understand where you're going. Now, this is challenging because feelings can be like a rollercoaster. I get that, but at the end of the day, what matters most are the details and not the story that goes with it, okay? And yes, Leafs, I notice you did a typo there. Oh, Laura says, I like your shirt. Thank you. By the way, the color on the camera doesn't look the same, okay? This is burgundy, but it looks like red more in the camera. So, all right, let's see what kind of other... By the way, if you have a question or you wanna join the hot seat, we're only gonna be on for a few more minutes, folks. I'm scrolling. By the way, if you have a question, write the word question and post the question thereafter makes it easier for me to find, okay? All right, here we go. Gina's in the house. After continually being lied to in a previous relationship, how are we supposed to trust a new person is telling the truth. Have we become too hypersensitive? This is a great question. So why should someone new pay the price for someone old? Why? Why do we do that? Well, it could be our filter. And certainly we have to examine what was our role in that relationship where we accepted lies. You know, if we habitually accepted lies then we have to take ownership in our part, okay? The best thing in these particular cases for me is forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiving love. When we forgive another person for their foibles and we let go and release them, not to absolve them of their bad doing, if you will, but we release them, then we're capable of leaning into a new relationship. But if you're holding resentment, if you're holding anger, if you're holding guilt, then the next person is gonna pay the price and they don't deserve that. Ladies, I've been on first dates where I'm sitting across from a woman on a first date and I can see the dozen men that have hurt that person in the way they communicate with me. See, I can see, I mean, it's clear as day, I can see these men. You don't realize that that subconscious pain, if you don't let go of that pain and release that pain and you might need to do what's called somatic therapy, I'm inviting Jeff Brown onto the channel to interview him. He wrote a great book called Grounded Spirituality. I'm actually interviewing him tomorrow. It'll be released sometime within a week, but he definitely talks about somatic therapy. In other words, getting that negative energy out of your body. And that's an invitation I have for all of you, okay? Judy's in the house. Is it too proud to text after I gave no contact? Told him he could text at the end of the month. What shouldn't I do? You know, when we act like children, we're gonna have to deal with grown-up consequences. And I'm saying, because I think when you say too proud, I'm assuming you played, you were manipulative. I'm just assuming here by not, you know, contacting them. I don't know, I'm just speculating because it's hard to tell where you're going with this, Judy. You know, I'm here to say grown-up conversations lead to grown-up results, okay? When we have grown-up conversations, when we speak from our heart, when we speak our truth, speak from our heart, we have better results. And that's my invitation for you, okay? Alice wants to let everyone know we have to be direct because most men aren't too swift about reading between the lines. You know what? Well, I don't like the term swift, but you know what? We don't know what's your lines, okay? We just don't know, you know, being direct. Okay, I want you to think about this, Alice. You're in a business meeting with your boss. Are you expected your boss to read between the lines? Or are you going to be direct, whether it's a male or female? Think about it that way. I want you to think about your talking to the ambassador of a country. You know, be diplomatic, be direct. Think of your boss. Think if you had the chance to speak to the president of the United States, possibly, or someone else. Be direct. This is grown-up way of doing things, okay? All right.  You know, it's frustrating.  I do think I have capacity to be empathetic and compassionate, but I also think, you know, there's hundreds and if not thousands of people watching this video. And I'm mindful of every, my patience is because I don't want everyone else to have to muddle through the water with someone. I appreciate people who speak directly. And so this is true in relationship too. It's not fun. By the way, remember I said lies? Okay, one of the first thing, people who are too vague.  It's like trying to read while you're, like while it's covered in spaghetti. Okay, so yes, I lose my patience. But I hope you see between the, I hope you can read between my lines. All right, let's keep. Oh, personal question.  Great question. Well, I'll show you. Here's the four of the three of us. Oh, hold on a second. So last night I got a chance to have dinner with Matt Khan and his lovely bride, Joy Kingsborough, who's a dear friend of mine. She was actually my coach for a while. Matt and Joy met earlier this year. They fell deeply in love with each other. They got engaged. They're actually scheduled to be married in two years. And you know, I really appreciate that. Oh, and they're gonna start a new podcast called Divine Partnership. And I will be interviewing them for my channel in a few weeks. So beyond the lookout for Divine Partnership. And I look forward to talking about them in an upcoming podcast as well. Laura just, if you have any more personal questions, feel free to ask them. Laura says, no contact is a legal term. I wouldn't use it in the context of relationship. I want to keep. Well, I don't know. I don't know how that's a legal term. I mean, I'm sure it's used in legal terms, but I see that as, you know, something that happens frequently in interpersonal relationships. That's just my perception anyway. And Divine Partnership, okay? Divine Partnership. I'm just gonna put this up on the screen, okay? Divine Partnership with Matt Kahn and Joy Kingsborough. Yes, indeed. Sherry wants to thank you for great content. I appreciate that. Donna says, nice, I appreciate that. Jonathan, just wanna say you have a great laugh. Thank you. You know, I will say this. I appreciate the love that you all generate towards me. I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate. I actually do my best to read all first comments on a new video, you know, the early comments. Partially because I look for content in there and I also appreciate that I'm on the right track.  I appreciate that as well. Sometimes I'm, you know, I'm myopic. You know, I'm a human being. I'm riddled with flaws.  I'm just merely a guide. My job is to learn something and pass it on. Learn something and pass it on. Learn something and pass it on. I'm just a guide. I'm just a few steps ahead of some of you and behind some of you as well.  If I'm such a good dating and relationship coach, then how could I have chosen a relationship that didn't work out? And I recognize that while, you know, I went in, could I have gone in, maybe a little naive, maybe a little bit, but you know what, I was excited. I was enthusiastic. We both had a lot going, you know, going for us. And to the extent that this was probably the healthiest relationship I've ever had in my life. So I feel like I'm on the right track. I feel as though that Marie is a really good person and it wasn't gonna go the distance, but I got so much out of the relationship. I got so much personally. And I learned really clear on what my must haves are right now. I'm very crystal clear on my must haves. I thought I was clear before, but now going through this experience, I have a propensity to compromise my needs and desires at times. Because, you know, I also believe that, you know, there's no such thing as the perfect relationship. And I suspect Marie also had to forego some of her needs and desires. So we weren't perfectly aligned. We got close. We got closer and closer in the beginning and it just started to move apart. But that's okay too, because you know what? We needed to learn what we need to learn. It was, you know, I think it takes about a year to really get to know a person, to see if they're a fit. We were together for 14 months before, wait, May, June. June, July. So roughly 14 and a half months. It's right at the perfect time, you know?  Remember yesterday, that woman who was with a man for five years that's been breadcrumming her? That's a no-no.  Marie is a really wonderful person. I'd like to think I'm a wonderful person too. We just weren't meant to go the distance. And that's okay too. And like Sharon says, you're human. Yeah, I think so. Leif says, Marie may have been your transition person to learn. You know, I think to the extent the word transition, I really do believe we both gained so much about what we needed to learn for ourselves in this experience. So I certainly, I don't like the word transition. I understand the context you mean it in. So I'm gonna be okay with it. But at the end of the day, it was just a blessing. You know, we both, I'd like to think we both grew.   Yes, it gets more crystal clear. Yeah, like I feel like, and by the way, now that I'm, by the way, okay, I know I did a video scrap the dating apps and now I'm back on the dating apps. Dating apps are just a spoke in the wheel. My point about scrapping the dating apps is don't let it become an obsession. So for me, it's no longer an obsession. I paid extra to see who swiped on me. And you know, there's been a couple of interesting people, but you know, believe it or not, I got ghosted the other day. Now, this isn't true ghosting, but I was communicating with someone. We probably had six or seven exchanges with one another. And then a week ago, gone. I mean, literally, haven't heard from her. So guess what? You ladies do it to us guys too. Maybe she met someone else. Maybe her car is in a ditch and she's recovering from a terrible accident.  I spoke sincere and from my heart. So guess what? She wasn't the right person, but guess what? It happens to all of us. I know you, many of you, I appreciate you put me on a pedestal, but to the stranger, I'm another guy. And guess what? Just like that woman who says, how can I trust someone brand new when I've been hurt so often?   And that just happens to be a byproduct of our current dating environment. Donna wants to say a painful spoke in the wheel takes a lot of time, not great when you live in a small town. I get it. I get it. You know, folks, I once said, create a life so awesome, you become the reality show people want to follow. When it comes to your love life, the most important person you're ever going to love, look at, this is a black mirror.  It's a black mirror, okay?  Okay? Alice says ghosting is just plain rude. Be a grownup. You know what? She didn't ghost me. She just lost interest because ghosting happens when you're dating someone and you disappear. This is just a person who lost interest. That's all it is from my perspective. Leafs wants to go on. Marie was and is lovely. And you two took a big leap. The relationship was a blessing. You know, I know we jumped in, you know, do I think we jumped in too quickly? If we were going to make it work, we had like, we liked each other. We thought we had potential. If we're going to make it work, we dove in, we tried it. You know, we had a very amicable split. So there was nothing wrong. It just wasn't the right fit. You know, so I think people, like this woman yesterday that was on Sarah, five years with a guy, four and a half years, excuse me. And he breadcrumbs her.  We better to dive in and see if it works than to drag it out for years. That's just my opinion anyway. All right. Is there a GG? Okay. Hey folks, believe it or not, my back is killing me and I've been sitting down. I've shot, I did, I was a guest. I was a guest on a video earlier tonight and now this and my back is killing me.  So I'm in pain, but I had to do this video because, you know, like this is just for those that are used to me being on a regular, I did show up, but I did throw up my back and I'm in pain. So I'm going to wrap up in a moment.  I am grateful from the bottom of my heart, especially all of you that are on right now, you know. I appreciate the support. This is why I appreciate that you like my video. You share my video. You join my group membership group. You join my midlife love mastery group. If you want more support, you can schedule a discovery call with me. You can find me on Instagram. You can get my dating now, Vows, you know? Patricia says, I need a good massage. Thank you, yes. Oh, really quickly, Donna, my live stream schedule is usually as follows, okay? I did a slight adjustment for the Golden Bachelor, but it's usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday nights. I begin live at 4.50 p.m. Pacific Coast time. And then usually Saturday mornings, I do a live stream. Those are my lives. And so that's what I typically do during the week. So, and then I have my Sunday videos. Hey, we got someone. Oh, well, someone joined and someone logged off at the same time. Alice says, soak in Epsom salts. Yes, I've done that. I think it's time to have a cocktail and loosen up a bit. Folks, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up. I am grateful beyond words for all your love and support. Please share, if you feel like this, if you feel like my content makes a difference, share this with your friends. Oh, Rebecca says, where can we see the interview? I'll be posting the interview with Matt or Jeff Brown, probably next week sometime. I'm really looking forward to interviewing Jeff Brown. In fact, oh wait, Jeff Brown, wait a minute. He wrote the book also Uncommon Bond. And he personally mailed this to me. So I've even got a little note from Jeff Brown as well. So I'm excited about that. All right, enough bragging for now. Folks, I'm going to get going tonight. I'm gonna go jump in the tub and relax and soak. So from the bottom of my heart, big, gigantic. Okay, folks, if you have something to share, please post a comment below. I do my best to read them all. As always, if you like this content, please hit that like button. Please share this video. Please subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell as well. Hit that notification. I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm asking you to turn to someone, a pet, a teddy bear pillow and give Iter them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. By the way, Leaves wants to remind me, Sunday we're recording I miss the balcony views. You know what? I don't have the overhang for the sun isn't, I just don't have the right lighting to do that. I think I did a Sunday video the other day and that was impromptu and that was a lot of fun. Okay, Francesca says, go to bed with a heating pad. Exactly. I wanna give funds and Rebecca and Casey, lock girl and Donna and Laura and Leaves and Margaret and Carrie and Judy and Miss Daisy, Elaine and Gina and G, oh, G, thanks for being on the hot seat. We give you a lot of love. Thanks for joining the membership as well. Big hugs to Queen and Debra and Fonz and Jamison and everyone else, Alice, big hugs to you all. Have a fab evening, be well, bye now.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Shekhar Singh, who is from the national campaign for people's right to information. Shekhar, good to have you with us. Good to be here. Of course, currently we have a very high decibel campaign on corruption. Anna's fast has entered I think today, the 10th day. There doesn't seem to be much scope for people in the middle. Those who are critical of the government and the way it has gone about it, those who think the methods Anna is adopting may not be the best way of resolving the issue. Do you think that in this whole process, the bill has sort of got to the background and what has come more is the methods, the process? Well, I think the middle space problem has been in both areas. There's been a problem of middle space in terms of the bill and in terms of the process. But fortunately, I think it's now growing very fast. I remember that we had drafted a bill or comments on the various issues and we had written to the Joint Committee saying, please give us a chance to put it across. And they had written back saying, yes, but it never happened. We then held off for a while and then came up with it. We were a little hesitant because we felt now that there are two established bills and all. We were amazed at how many people said we were looking for a middle space. Now that was for the bill. The same thing is happening as far as the process goes. Though the process options are less clear because there is the sword hanging over our heads that Anna's health and well-being is at stake. So you can't discuss it as dispassionately as you can the bill. But I think that middle space is growing very fast. And to my mind, that is the way forward. In this, it's an interesting issue that the way the government went about it. First, negotiating with them, inviting them in, having a joint committee. Later on turning around and saying Anna is corrupt, putting him in jail. Do you think that the Congress really shot itself in the foot in this? Very much so. There is no doubt. In fact, I am amazed at their incompetence, frankly speaking. One could understand their deviousness. One could understand disagreeing with their ideology or perspective. But I didn't think that they'd be so incompetent. After all, it's a party in power for more than anybody else. But do you think Shaker is also because today the people who are the leading lights of the Congress are all ruthless politicians, basically dependent on how they, you know, the quote-unquote dynasty or how Sonia Gandhi really looks at them. And that sort of sat the inner party democracy in the Congress. They don't really have the feel of the pulse of the people. Well, I'm not so sympathetic in this matter with the dynastic argument because if it was Raul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi who were behind all this, then I would agree with you. Actually, what has happened is that we have a lot of very influential people in the government. Who are professionals, who got in as professionals who have no experience of grassroots politics, who have no experience of movements, who have not been trade union leaders, who have not been parts of movements, who have not been politicians. They look at the world as black and white, you know. This is legal, this is not legal. This is constitutional, this is not causing. Now, that's not how people respond. So, I think there has been a lot of miscalculation. But I'd like to say one other thing. We've been having talks with the various ministers and so on and so forth. You see, it works both ways. Team Anna, as it's called now, very meticulously planned their intervention in April. I know this because we were in discussion with them. And I remember on the 4th of April, we were in discussion at the National Advisory Council. And this issue was raised that Anna is coming this evening and what should be done? What should we say to him? And we said, look, we made so much progress. Why not appeal to him to wait for a little while? See if the NSE is in agreement with what he really wants. And if the government accepts it, if not, then we'll all join you for a protest. But no, the timing was right at that point. Five states were going in for elections. And I can tell you that senior ministers told us in retrospect when we raised the same question, what is this? Which government could afford to have Anna's face on the television every day weakening when you have five elections coming up? But you know, Shekhar, if you really look at it, look at the way the people are reacting. It's a fact that this government has, or at least the Ban Mohan Singh government has seen in public eye to be the most corrupt government we had had, though we have Ban Mohan Singh himself as a person of unimpeachable credibility on that count. The point is that on every issue, the government has been taken kicking and screaming to where it is now, whether it's Raja, whether it is the Commonwealth Games, whether it's still to build up, whether you have the Reliance Camp, which is also going to come in the K Krishnagodavari Basis Camp. And many more. And many more in the pipeline. And the essential issue is Ban Mohan Singh government does not seem to respond. It's only when it is pressed by other bodies, Supreme Court, CAG, whatever it is. Only then it does something. Don't you think that sort of fueling also the anger amongst the people? Absolutely. In fact, it's interesting that it can only be a prime minister who is sure of his personal credibility, who can look the other way for rampant corruption. Because you're safe, nobody point a finger at me. If that person wasn't sure of his own credibility, he'd be constantly looking around to make sure that there's nothing which reflects on him. So this is one part of it. Only difference is that I'm not sure that there hasn't been a lot of corruption in the past. I think what has changed because of the economic status we are in at the moment, liberalization, etc., is that first of all, the figures involved. Magnitudes are the order of that. The nature has changed. You see, earlier it was License Raj or whatever you call it, the nature has changed. But I think scams have been going on for a long time. Two things have changed. One, I would like to think you might or might not agree, that the bringing in of the Right to Information Act has opened up the floodgates. So I feel that part of it is a transitional stage. And to my mind, a positive transitional stage where things are coming out and where the system is being shaken up and has to learn to deal with it. The third point, and I think that's a point that you started with, I certainly think that this has been the basis for the Anna movement. But consider that team Anna has also been very clever where they've been able to channelize this disgust against corruption. In a very clever way, argue, actually it's support for us. Fair enough, but again, whoever takes to the streets is going to do that. And it is also true that while your group is largely seen to be sort of influencing the government through the NSE and so on, then they have quote unquote successfully brought out the people on the roads. Therefore, the credit of building up the pressure of the government is there. See, that's again an unfortunate perception. There are 26 members of our working group out of which two are members of the NSE. They're not barring Aruna, they're not necessarily the leaders of the NCPRI yet. The NSE was formed six years back, the NCPRI was formed in 1996. Number three, I represent an urban middle class, but the real strength of the NCPRI has actually been in the villages of different part, grassroots people. And sometimes we argue the other way around that because they're grassroots people, we don't have the same influence as middle class because I'm sure if we got in 15,000 people from the villages of Rajasthan and Haryana and Punjab, TV would not be half as interesting. And Bollywood figures. Absolutely. So what I'm saying is that actually it's both ways around. We also recognize that this is a 24-7 TV phenomenon. See, people are saying this is unprecedented. Take away nothing from the Anna team, they've been meticulous in their planning. But that very statement that they've been meticulous also shows that much of this is because they're using Twitter, Facebook, 24-7 TV, etc., which was not available earlier. So let us not build in more into this than there is. I would honestly say and if you read the newspaper reports that are coming, for example, this morning I read that in the Ramleela ground, they now have a separate tent which says women only. Because there have been, at least that's what the newspaper says, large amount of complaints about people being molested. Now what does that mean? There's another report which says that they interviewed a large number of students from JNU, from Delhi University, who said we came to see what we're not, we don't support it because we don't think this is going to work. Shekhar, that also brings up the important question that what is the stake of the media in this? Because if you really look at it, you said about past. We had the JP movement, we had this, what was called Total Revolution in these days. We very recently had a very large workers march in the city, which television didn't cover and the only headlines in the papers were, it caused a traffic jam.  What is an issue, what is an event and what is not today? It's interesting, I was recently in a media house on this and one of their very senior people said to me, he says you know there were media houses which were going down financially. And once this movement has started, their viewership has gone up, their advertising revenue has gone up. The fact that cricket has really gone in the back burner is one of the reasons. And the problem is that the cricket team is looting so badly that nobody wants to watch it in any case. So what are you going to watch? So this was provided. So that's one. Secondly, you see, it's also this problem that if one channel starts covering, then nobody can be left out because nobody knows it. Suppose people are interested in that and we don't cover it, nobody is going to watch us. So all you need to do today is get one channel on your side and get a commitment that we will cover it 24-7. Everybody has to follow suit. And because they follow suit, it's a self-satisfying prophecy. Because everybody now, at the end of the day, if all channels are showing Anna, then obviously it follows everybody is watching Anna because there's nothing else to watch. But the other part of it is, don't forget the media recently, very recently, was involved in the news for money. It's very much something that they have managed to cover up. Do you think it's also a way for them to get back into public credibility? You talked only about media. Let me bring in the corporate sector here. See the two big elements of the society who are at the moment left out of detailed scrutiny by the Anna movement or the corporate houses in the media. Now, I don't think that there's any conspiracy involved because I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories. But it's interesting that the corporate sector is supporting the movement through huge donations. Openly, I mean, it's on the website. And the media supporting the movement through huge coverage. And the other two, which have been left out. The belief that actually the corporations who have been involved in these huge scams, that they somehow are victims. I have, in the last four months, spoken to seven meetings of CEOs across the country as invited on this issue of corruption. The general feeling that was conveyed was, we don't have an option. See, they have earlier bent the system to their cause.  Let's not forget, few of the business houses are today completely part of what's happening. And let's not also forget that you have very influential government figures who today are also business houses. In the fact that you have Sharad Pawar who runs a huge empire in Maharashtra. There is the Karnanidhis. So you really have this fusion of political class and the business class in which some of the business might be out of it, where a lot of them are also inside. It's also interesting that one of the reasons why I accepted this invitation to speak to these seven groups across the country in different sense, was that I felt, okay, this is a good chance to try and get some support. Not financial support because we don't look for that, but let the corporate side. So my main message to them used to be that look at the moment people aren't talking about you. But somebody is somebody going to ask, what was the corporate sector doing? So why don't you people also get together? Say something, come up with some, because if you don't come up with any suggestions, other people will and then you might not like them. My last meeting which was in Delhi, the seventh meeting, I said to them, I spent my life thinking I was a persuasive talker. I said I have spoken to about a thousand CEOs, not a single wiggle out of them, saying let's formulate our own inputs, let's speak, let the fikki get together and say this is guide, this is how we want to, not a single important. There are as much beneficiaries as victims, that's the whole problem. So this is the interesting historical scenario and we hope that some way there will be a step back from the brink and Anna's past will be called up with some concrete assurances for a stronger Lokpal bill. When we come back, we'll discuss the Lokpal bill in its various avatars which are going around and look at the various provisions, which could be problematic, which could have problems or which could have advantages. Thank you. We'll come back to you in a little while.


Hey there friends. Thanks for checking in at the rage now and we're going to do a range comparison with the CZ 97 BD and the Springfield Armory 1911 operator both full-size 45 ACP handguns the operator has a five-inch barrel The CZ 97 has a 4.65 inch barrel, but when you align them, they are pretty close both steel frames both heavy-duty But they are very different. Let's start with the CZ 97 BD if any handgun Replicates the shadow 2 and 45. This is it. It has aluminum grips 10 round mags comes with two 10 round mags MSRP on this is 945 CZ discontinued it. Why'd they do that? I don't know a lot of people consider this one of the finest 45s out there the single action trigger pull measures right at Four pounds with a very nice Reset some of these came with night sights. This has two dot in the rear Fiberoptic front sight forward serrations for the press checks. It has a loaded chamber Indicator pin that sticks up right there. And this is the decocker model.  It also has a barrel bushing right there All right, and it comes with a wrench to take that off. It is threaded inside of The upper and it keeps the barrel nice and tight 10 round mags 12 yards away Let's take a few shots here Yeah, this thing is sweet and a lot of people say that's a great 45 ACP and many people wondered why did CZ discontinue it has to be For sales. That's the only reason I could think of but the 97 BD in 45 with that nice Single action trigger, but here we have the Springfield Armory operator This has VZ G10 grips here and it comes with two eight round mags Now you're either gonna love the 1911 or you're gonna want a double action single action handgun That's the greatest difference both full-size. This has a pick rail that the CZ does not both have forward serrations two dot rear sights Tridium front dot and once again the single action trigger measures right at four pounds With a shorter reset Man, I love 1911s. This is gonna be a tough one because I own both these and I think they're both pretty phenomenal Looks like my sight over there turned a little bit. We may still try to hit that But let's shoot these eight rounds from the Springfield Armory Operator MSRP on this is right around $1100 So knocked off the 10 inch and then the the other one is turned so The operator fine handgun love it right around $1100. It does have a serocoded black Frame and slide. I think it looks cool flat dark earth VZ G10 grips noise trigger Skeletonized hammer and trigger and mech gar mags love mech gar mags love CZ mags Here we have the 97 BD and The Springfield Armory operator. I'm gonna give you my thoughts if they did not discontinue this I typically choose 1911 all day long. I'm a huge fan I love the operator. I think Springfield does a phenomenal job with the 1911s But because they discontinued it and I've wanted this for years actually I really I really wanted this for years I got my hands on this and then soon after that they discontinued it. I'm choosing the 97 BD I have plenty of 1911s. I think that is a solid choice But the Springfield Armory operator this can compare with any 1911 out there. It's pretty phenomenal I hope I demonstrated and spoke about each one of these handguns I hold them both in high esteem What I really want to know is which one would you choose if you like videos like this, please subscribe and share I always appreciate thumbs up button. Thanks for watching and you guys be safe