All right. Welcome, everyone, to the presentation about OpenStack Helm, managing the lifecycle of OpenStack on top of Kubernetes. My name is Alan Meadows. I'm a cloud architect at AT&T. My name is Brandon Joseph. I'm a community team lead for AT&T. I'd like to ask a quick question. I'm wondering how many people in the audience are running Kubernetes in some way? And how many people in the audience are leveraging Helm in some way? OK. And one question I'm just curious about. How many people are leveraging OpenStack on top of Kubernetes in the audience? All right, cool. We'll see if we can increase that number. So I figure before we start talking about OpenStack Helm, it's probably pretty important to just briefly touch on what Helm is. So really simply put, Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. So it helps you define, install even the most complex Kubernetes applications. And you do so using Helm charts. Charts are collections of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes artifacts. And a single chart might be used to deploy something simple, like Memcache or Apache. But it also might be used to deploy something complex, like a full stack with servers, databases, caches, and other things like that. It has an understanding of interchart dependencies. So it can understand that one chart requires another chart to help build a full deployment. But at its core, one of the things that Helm brings to the table for us is the fact that it allows us to templatize our experience with Kubernetes. So we can introduce overrides as we're installing these applications that are either operator-specific or environment-specific. It also wraps up all of these charts and installations into independent releases inside Helm so that this collection of artifacts inside Kubernetes can be managed as one unit. So we can delete it as one unit, we can upgrade it as one unit, and we can install it as one unit. So that brings us to what's OpenStack Helm. So it's essentially, it's a marriage of Kubernetes. It's a marriage of Helm and OpenStack. So this project, which is an OpenStack project, seeks to create Helm charts for each OpenStack service. So these Helm charts will provide complete lifecycle management of these OpenStack services. But really beyond just creating these charts and being able to instantiate these services, the goal is to provide full lifecycle management for OpenStack services. So that means that it will be a framework that will allow you to deploy, update, maintain, and basically operate a fully functioning OpenStack environment for both simple and complex environments. So users of OpenStack Helm, so they can either deploy individual OpenStack components or the full stack, and then heavily borrows concepts from stack entities and other complex Helm application deployments. So I think in order to kind of set the stage here, we should talk about the history of OpenStack Helm because it has a nice history. But it was just a short time ago where we started in Barcelona. And it was a collection of many companies and ideas and things like that. It was actually born from a company SAP. You probably all know them. They had this idea that there was an easier way to deploy OpenStack on top of Kubernetes. Also, you guys are familiar in Austin, stack entities was born. And that made quite a buzz throughout the community. So what we ended up doing was we worked with the COLA team to talk about this concept. There were a couple of things that were on the table. There was Helm. There was KPM, Kubernetes package manager, that CoreOS was backing. And we needed to determine a path. And since Helm was in Kubernetes Incubator, it was apparent that there was a lot of force behind that. And so we kind of rowed behind that. So this also takes some concepts from Intel as well. They were collaborators in this stack entities project. They had a project in particular, which was interesting to COLA and OpenStack Helm, the folks at AT&T, the entry point. And this handles dependency logic. And we'll kind of talk about this a little bit more. And then it also was born out of our communication with Helm in the Kubernetes side. So we had to reach across the aisle to the folks at Kubernetes and the Helm community and say, what's your vision for this? Can we, we're going to put an entire OpenStack deployment on this, and we're seeing kind of small apps, web apps and things like that. OpenStack is definitely not that. So we wanted to work with them a little bit more closely too. So we have several contributors. And from that point on, I should say that we were dedicated to providing a POC for the community in general and demonstrate that we could do this, because we had the task from our leadership asking, OK, what's this going to look like, and can we really move forward with this? So we did a POC, presented that back, and we were able to prove it out. So we ended up continuing on with the project, with the architectural vision that we're about to go over here, and that's the history. So we're going to do two live demos today. One of them, we're going to kick off, briefly watch it, and we will come back to it at the very end. So we are going to instantiate the Mataka version of OpenStack across three bare metal hosts. Now these three bare metal hosts have already been provisioned with Kubernetes, but that's all that's been done. So we will do that. It'll take about six minutes, and I think one of the things that's probably important to mention is that we're going to do this with what is essentially one command. So we have two configuration files, appropriately named Mataka.yaml and Newton.yaml. And so we'll start with Mataka.yaml and feed that into a tool that will essentially instantiate all of the OpenStack Helm core services, ensure that all the overrides that are appropriate for this environment are taken into account. And we should have a fully functioning OpenStack environment that our scripts will also create a test VM that will get a floating IP, and it will be a fully functioning thing at the end of the day. So let's see if this switch is over. OK. So these are our three bare metal hosts, CLCP demo 1, 2, and 3. Two of them are control plane hosts. They're labeled appropriately that way. One of them is a tenant compute host. In this window over to the right-hand side, we're just doing a kube control show.  That's essentially using our Mataka.yaml file. We're just using a utility here called WeaveScope to help give us some visualization of what the containers are doing at the end of the day. And essentially, we've fired the full stack of the OpenStack services that OpenStack Helm supports at this point. So we're going to let this run in the background, and we'll just continue with the presentation. And we'll come back to this at the end. And we will do the second part of this demo, which is an in-place upgrade of this environment with a live resource in it. So we'll explain in detail what each of these... We're going to go into detail, rather, into each of these bullets here, but let's just briefly sort of summarize what each of these means in terms of vision for OpenStack Helm. So the most important thing is being agnostic. You know, it's a goal to be image agnostic. So that way, there's a lot of... At least at AT&T, we have a customized OpenStack deployment. I can't imagine that everybody is running no customizations. So whether it's Kola or whether it's Loki or we need to build our own images, we can use tools to build those images thanks to the Kola community. We want to remain image agnostic. We also want to provide a framework that essentially provides independent OpenStack service charts. If you're providing a platform that just wants to leverage Keystone by itself, that should be something that's supported. If you want to just leverage Keystone sender and neutron, that's okay. You don't need to pull in the full stack. You can pick and choose which components you want to deploy. And if you've been working with OpenStack for a while, which I assume all of us have, each OpenStack service has a set of patterns. We need to have a user. We need to create a database. We need to init or sync that database. So we want to have clear, defined patterns that can be repeated in every single OpenStack chart. This is partially what makes the project very fun to work with for developers. They can essentially just copy these patterns and then concentrate on the things like the deployments and so forth. We also want to provide, we want to push the control completely into the edge. So this means that all the deployment logic, the dependencies, the deployment graphs, so to speak, or the main brain that's controlling how things get installed, we believe that should live in the actual charts themselves. So when someone introduces a new OpenStack help chart, they have complete control over how things are operating. A really big item too for us is flexible configuration overrides. Again, going back to being able to have a completely customized solution, we're able to deploy that with a single command. But in order to do that, you need to have some way to override these things. So we provide flexible configuration overrides across any of the service charts and we'll go into further detail on that in a moment. And so really, finally, we want this whole system to work for very small and very large installations. So we believe you should be able to install this on your laptop and it should be able to support 4,000 compute hosts. So when we talk about the immutable container or image agnosticity, we're really just talking about codes, like bucket codes, or codes, a code bucket, I'm sorry. And that is, I just need my OpenStack core services. I need the things to get those running, but I don't want anything additional in the container that's not necessary, like orchestration or whatnot. When we have that, it actually increases our attack vector in the container. It's more to maintain as far as CVEs. So we wanna reduce that a little bit. We also want to consider our decisions in architecture so that way we can, if we're going to remove these things from the container, well, we've gotta have some way to put them back. If we need to create users and so forth, we wanna have a pattern for doing that that's image agnostic also. So we do that with jobs and that's clearly defined in the project. And it also gives you just a single source of truth. You're looking at the chart itself, you can tell exactly what the container's doing, no magic in the container, just code. Let's see. We also want you to be able to use any, to this point, we want you to be able to use any type of base image that you want. Whether it's Ubuntu or CentOS, careful consideration needs to be made when creating the jobs and so forth because there are some uniqueness between these two flavors. And we want to make sure that the jobs make sense and that they'll work across anything. And then troubleshooting the chart too. So if I need to look at a particular job and a job has failed, then we don't wanna go into the container or anything like that. We wanna use native Kubernetes commands to kinda figure out what's going on. And additionally, we want you to be able to turn the knobs in the chart itself as opposed to going into the container and doing something different. That's a really, really important thing for us. So one of the early decisions, the architectural decisions we had to make with OpenStackCalm was how we wanna structure the charts. So we've already discussed that Helm has the concept of charts depending upon other charts. And by leveraging that, one of the common patterns that exists is to wrap up a complex application into a larger meta parent chart. So with all the services being automatically deployed as child charts, they're simply described as dependencies of that parent chart.  And from a developer perspective, that's also an easier way to share information between charts, which is especially relevant for OpenStack. But it comes at a cost. First, it assumes that you wanna deploy the entire stack. If you just want several elements out of the larger OpenStack meta chart, you're out of luck. While Helm supports installing different Helm charts into different namespaces, the parent chart concept forces them all into the same namespace of the parent chart. And finally, what really was most important to us and would be difficult to correct in this model would be that from a production operator perspective, updating any of the child charts requires that you go back and update the parent chart. And while most of the time, a change to one of the child charts should result in only a change there, there's a risk that you may actually inadvertently affect something else. And we needed a very guaranteed level of impact. In other words, when you update the glance Helm release, we wanted to be very sure that that was not impacting any of the other releases at the end of the day. The path that we chose for OpenStack Helm was an independent chart approach, which essentially means that every chart is self-contained, they're independent, their installation results in a single Helm release for each component that can be independently maintained. The immediate disadvantage, though, that we realized with this is that without the mega chart orchestrating all of this, the operator, or some set of automation, needs to manage the installation of all these charts and all the overrides and other things that need to be fed to them. Likely a lot of this is the same information shared between the charts, and we developed an approach for that that we'll talk about shortly. Obviously, one of the immediate benefits we realized with this is that we can control, at a granular level, the placement and duplication of each of these services in different namespaces with extreme granularity. So this opens up all sorts of hyperscale patterns where we can have a MariahDB cluster per OpenStack service. Each service can have its own RabbitMQ cluster. It also means that platforms looking for just one or two OpenStack components, obviously, can leverage this particular approach. And again, finally, most importantly for us, from an operator perspective, it meant that we could guarantee that an update to one particular component, that update was only going to that component at the end of the day. So this gets into reusable patterns, and this is, I think, one of the coolest things. There's a lot of cool things I like about the project, obviously, but the feedback we get most often when working with developers and so forth is that the charts are fun to work with. Part of this is because the reusable patterns. So to start off with, Helm itself has a reusable pattern, right? So there's a specific set of files and directory structures that are kicked off that you can start with. Another thing is that the jobs that I spoke about earlier, you know, these common things like a DBNet or DB Sync, et cetera, we have a Helm toolkit, which is a set of functions that basically allows you to repeat the jobs per each service and then override those in the values file too. So if I want a particular user for Glance or a particular user for Horizon, I can essentially just use the same jobs and override those in the values of a ride file, and they're deployed exactly the same. So it's reliable, it's reusable, et cetera. Also, you know, from this, you know, this was created by developers, obviously, but we care about the developer experience. So this reduces the amount of technical debt that a developer has when getting started with the project. But that said, it is a deployment project. So it's not just for developers. I mean, if you have a DevOps mindset or whatnot, it's very easy for you to get started and start contributing to the project. If there's a particular chart that you want included. We also have a common bootstrap model. So we all know that, you know, when you instantiate an open stack cluster, you need things like flavors and images and things like that. You need things to kind of get started. So again, going back to, you know, the problems that AT&T has experienced from a large operator, you know, we want to be able to inject these custom bootstrap items at initial runtime. So, or as these things are being deployed. And so we've created a bootstrap model that also allows you to create your own custom flavors and so forth, right in the values file. That's really nice for operators because they have to look no further than that values file to get started. Also, there's clear patterns within the values file itself. So resource limits for Kubernetes, those are in the same place. If I had to find my users, same place. Config, same place. So there's a pattern for you to get started that way you don't have to look for, you know, some overrides in some sections and overrides in other sections and so forth. And they're all relatively, they look the same. And then also an important one too is, again, going back to a scale thing, we want the Kubernetes services to be, we know that we're gonna have hybrid cloud situations, right? So we may have an open stack service that is hard to roll off of or whatnot and we want to be able to communicate with it. So we allow you to use either an Ingress or Ingress controller if you're familiar with Kubernetes. It seemed like there was a large amount of people that have used Kubernetes so you're familiar with this. Or a node port, right? There's some cases where you may want to use node port, use your own load balancers, et cetera. That's completely fine. These are things that can be overridden again and the values file making it a lot easier for operators. So we mentioned that an important philosophy that we have is control at the edge. Couple slides ago and the primary motivation behind this is that we want to avoid the introduction of a centralized controller that needs to be updated with any change in the inclusion of additional open stack services or the introduction of a brand new service. Examples of how this control is actually defined at the edge is the upgrade philosophies under the control, in other words how the rolling updates work in Kubernetes. That is actually defined within each of the charts themselves. The dependencies that that particular chart needs are all defined in the chart so it knows how to wait for the things that it needs in terms of external dependencies before actually the real Kubernetes work really launches at the end of the day. So examples, I mean, and finally given the distributed nature of open stack, the same, so the endpoint lookups, these are also something that needs to be under the control of the actual charts themselves and what that allows is that each of these charts can essentially point to unique and individual infrastructure services that they need to. So we mentioned that hyperscale model before. It's necessary that the actual charts are in control over what endpoints they're pointed at in terms of message queues, other open stack services and things like that. So we have full flexibility in creating any kind of open stack installation at the end of the day. So there's common theme that we need to provide flexibility, agnosticity, all these things to give you guys, the operators and developers options at the end of the day. So this gets into providing flexible configuration override. So now our values are, we can override those. Those are now flexible. We can define resource limits and things like that. We have a nice pattern that's been established, but what about the configs themselves, right? So we have highly customized nova.conf file or maybe we've got some specific sender back ends that we're trying to configure and so forth. So what about these configs? Because these can get unruly. Well, what we've done is allowed you to override these as well. So we have a tool that's been created and it's in the tools directory in the project. It's an Oslo GenConfig utility. And what that does is it will create value overrides for configs, your any files, your policy.json files, these things that would talk, typically you would need to be highly customized, right? You need all these knobs to be able to turn and create your own deployments of each individual services. We run through those and apply values to those. So then you can take those values and then override them in the main values, the values manifest. That's extremely powerful. That puts all the power in your hands to do whatever you need to without actually touching the chart. And that's the main concept, right? Is that we want you to be able to have every knob to turn without actually touching anything except the values. If you're just an operator, you wanna use the project, it's easy for you to get started and do this. And that's a very powerful thing. Let's see. Additionally, there's the concept of you can use partials. You can prepend or postpend if you wanna use that. Or if you wanna just ingest an entire config, yeah, no problem. If you don't want to use the values override and that's maybe not flexible enough for you and you want to, you already have your configs and you just wanna carry those over, yeah, that's fine, you can go ahead and do that. So we wanted to make that as extremely flexible as possible. The next is, and I was passionate about this in the very beginning, is working on small and extremely large environments. So we've done several different ways of doing this. MiniCube we used for a while. And then we kind of like took this on ourselves a little bit, but the message is the same. We want the deployment to be exactly the same, barring like back ends and things like that. On a developer's laptop, as it is in production. And that's extremely powerful too because now the developer can turn all their knobs, they can see things, we've got a guy that his laptop boots up and it's just instantly there. Like that's how much he works on it, right? So that's extremely flexible too. If you're a developer and you start working with the project and you're going to your leadership and saying, hey, this is something we really need to consider, that makes it really powerful. You can take POCs and demonstrate that elsewhere. It's easy for your developers. And then you're guaranteed that if it worked here on your laptop, it's the same thing, really just replicated now in production at Hyperscale. So with all this flexibility in all these independent charts and all these overrides and possible customizations, we believed early on that there should be a solution for managing a collection of charts and all these parameters that they need to be fed. So Helm thus far is really primarily focused on, focused itself as being a command line tool operating on one chart at a time. And we really wanted a way to declaratively define what we wanted to achieve, source control that and point that tool at the configuration and just have it drive. So we developed Armada, which is an open source tool to do this for us. So at its core, it's simply a replacement for the Helm client. It still works with the Helm engine that's running inside Kubernetes, which runs as a pod. And we simply wanted to provide more programmatic control over Helm. So a typical Armada YAML configuration file consists of defining several charts, other dependencies, all the overrides that need to happen for each of the Helm releases. And we also expanded some of the flexibility to support things like reaching out to get to fetch the chart source and included other options like deleting Kubernetes resources that need to happen during an upgrade and other workflow type things. Eventually, we'll expand it to include things like potentially supporting things like backing up databases prior to upgrades and other things like that so that you can really outline the whole procedure and flow for how you want your upgrade or changes to take place. So it's worth touching a little bit about on how OpenStack Helm handles the complex initialization process that OpenStack services require. So this is obviously something that the demo just went through. Many things need to be managed and done in the right order. So we need to create databases for services, grant access to specific users on those databases, set their passwords. We need to create service users inside Keystone, set passwords, roles. We need to create Keystone services, create endpoints and create endpoints for different types of endpoints, internal and admin and public. And all of this needs to be done in the right order, needs to be done idempotently so that if one of them fails, it can rerun, which is the native Kubernetes way. And it needs to be able to support us running it once during installation and then again, when we actually upgrade that environment. We do all of this using Kubernetes jobs. So these are very granular jobs that just do one specific thing. In other words, create a database or grant a role on the database or initialize a new user inside the backend message queue system that this particular service is supposed to use. So what's next? You know, if you saw David Aaron-Checks talk from Google, you, like, we need people. We need people to use it. We need people to develop around it, give feedback. We're working closely with, you know, all sorts of groups, Intel, SAP, the Kola folks. In the very beginning, we started this as, like I said, a POC in November of 2016. And here we are, we've got many charts up to Magnum. And we're at a .5 release, so we're still very, very young. That said, we're very confident in the project. And to give you a sense of timeline, you know, this is an OpenStack project. So, you know, we wanted to show that this isn't an AT&T project. This is a U project. This is an OpenStack project. That said, internally, our timeframe for using this is 1710. So in October, we want to use this fully so that should give you an idea of where we want to be and where we want to take the project. But that says nothing on you bringing yourself to the project and giving us feedback and so forth. So, and just quickly, a little update about how AT&T will use this product when it eventually rolls out, is that we have 80 plus zone deployments. Each of those zones actually include two OpenStack regions. So really, we're talking about 160 OpenStack installations. We're targeting 100 plus, which what that translates to is 200 plus OpenStack production installations. So this is a lot of installations potentially receiving OpenStack Helm. Each of these installations are complex. They run carrier grade workloads. They span from small sites all the way to very large sites. And our availability today is fairly high and we intend to keep that even after the transition to OpenStack Helm. Do you want to show the demo as I do the open source? Yeah. Okay. We want to show you the demo because we got more than just starting it. So, us in open source, like AT&T and open source. You know, we've been in various stages in open source. Our approach now is everything goes in open source and it's made available to everyone, but that's not just like made available. That means that you could take it and use it. Our motto is a POC to demonstrate to the Helm community the features that we would like in Helm core. So it's not something that like we really want to maintain or anything like that. That's something that we want to actually start the conversation. Like this is what we think the Helm client could use. This is what our vision in our use cases and actually that's been really responsive. So our goal is to POC it, right? So we've got a POC, we can demonstrate it now. Now there's something to talk to as opposed to just talking. Sometimes it's hard to get those concepts across to the other aisle, but if we POC it, then it becomes much easier to see the vision. If I could type the IP correctly, we could just verify. So what Alan's doing right now is he's going to start establishing just an ICMP. You guys might have seen this. Some of you might have seen this. We're going to do a token request, a keystone and leave that going in the background. We've got the horizon dashboard up and ready, but the deployment was successful. So while we've been talking up here and so forth, that one command that you saw, it ran through and it installed the entire stack. And this is what you see today. So we can launch VMs. So what Alan's showing is that a VM is actually launched and go a little further. Yeah, so I mean, so in the bottom left-hand corner, we've SSH into the VM that we just provisioned. It's got a floating IP address. It's a public IP. We are connected to it and inside that VM, we're just looking at its network interfaces. We are proceeding with the upgrade from Newton to Mataka. I'm sorry for the other way. We're proceeding with the upgrade from Mataka to Newton at the moment. And then the bottom right-hand corner, we're doing a simplistic example of showing that we have a path towards having the control plane operational while we're doing this upgrade. And obviously we're showing a very happy path. We're doing something very simple like fetching a keystone token. Obviously a lot more work to be done to ensure that we could do something highly complex while this rolling update is occurring. But I think it shows that a lot of the foundations are in place in this project already. I was gonna say, there's a few of you that said that you used Helm. So if you used Helm, and let's say you had a job that completed, have you ever had a problem where the job just never cleaned up? And this is kind of a Helm thing. So Armada actually, it will clean up jobs before it reruns and that's an extremely valuable thing. That's one of the features that we wanted to present to the Helm developers as a POC again, not as just talking about this. So it shows the use case on why we would actually want this. So I think this also demonstrates what's occurring under the hood in some ways. So as we're doing the rolling update, which itself is defined, the behavior of it is defined in the charts in terms of how that should proceed. But we also see components in an init state. And basically they're doing dependency checking to make sure that the things that they need are actually there. In other words, if a service requires keystone or requires a certain database synchronization's job to have run to bring it up to the version that that particular service needs, it will sit there and wait until that eventually completes. And you guys might have seen some other demos like this. We've been running variations of this demo. But as this upgrade is going on, we're using a Seth backend for Kubernetes. And we actually show a video and the video doesn't drop as we're doing this upgrade on the tenant workload. And that's extremely useful as well. That's what we showed our leadership and our leadership was happy. So that allows us to continue working on the project. One other thing to point out is that in this particular environment that we're looking at, and what comes out of the box in OpenStack Helm is that everything runs as a container. So MiraiDB is clustered. It's running as a container. Seth is providing PVC backends for Kubernetes. It runs as a container. There is nothing in this environment that's not containerized. And the nice thing about this is it just runs, right? So going forward, we want to improve our development process and improve on our gates and so forth to make sure that we're always working off of master. We've learned a lot about managing cloud at scale, some things to do, some things not to do, et cetera. We're bringing this to the community and to the project and trying to work with other companies and individuals who want to contribute to the project to make this better. So our call to action is, again, try the project, give us feedback. Also, the story doesn't end here. It actually goes into Helm. So what we're expecting from the community around OpenStack Helm is to reach beyond the aisle over to the Kubernetes group quite a bit. This is essentially Kubernetes, OpenStack on Kubernetes, right? So we want to engage with that community. They're going to give us a lot of advice. And this is what we feel to be a perfect marriage or a perfect demonstration of the two communities collaborating quite a bit for the common good. And the common good is infrastructure and provided in a resilient fashion. So we have completed the upgrade, the in place upgrade. We're now logged into the Newton version of Horizon with the beautiful left blue hand navigation. And there is our same instance still running. We've been connected to it down below. And so we've completed an in place upgrade. So I'm gonna talk about Newton. Good.


In this video we're going to take a look at the use, misuse, and abuse of symbols and in particular how that relates to the area of persuasion. Before we get to that specifically though, let me ask you this. Run a little exercise here. What is this? Not a trick question. Just what is it? What would you say it is? Well, this video is in English and for the most part most of us watching this are going to probably automatically go to the English word for this particular creature, right? Which is cat. Not a trick question. Again, it's just a cat, right? So CAT cat. But where does that come from? I mean, that's not the only word for it, right? If we were to look in Spanish, we would see that it's a goto, right? Or if we were in Russian and I'm going to mispronounce this, but that collection of symbols in Russian is pronounced something like cut, right? And that's what they would call it. If we were in Russia and they saw an animal like this, they would say cut. But if we went, you know, slightly south of Russia to China, we would see that this is the symbol for this animal. And I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce how they would pronounce it. But that's the symbol, right? But okay, fair enough. This video is in English. We're probably all going to speak English. Why don't we just refer to it in English?  Let's call it a fork. From now on, this animal shall be henceforth known as a fork. Not to be confused with the fork that you use to eat, you know, and that has the tines and things. But we're going to call it a fork, right? How does that sit with you? You know, probably not well, right? Well, why not? Well, because it's not a fork, right? It's a cat. It's a cat. So okay, fair enough. Let's go back to cat. But where does this come from? Why do we call it a cat? What does that mean? What special significance does that collection of letters come from? What does that collection of letters have that it would be representative of this animal? Well, that's just it, right? There's no magical formula that says, you know, this animal has to be called this because of such as... It's just something we decided a long time ago that this animal, you know, or animals of that type are going to be called cats. And it's going to be spelled C-A-T. And all of this is really just getting to the idea that communication is symbolic. There's no magic formula, but, you know, these are all just symbols that represent an idea. And so that's where we're starting at today. The idea that communication is symbolic, that all communication is symbolic. First of all, we have language, right? That's symbolic. These are made-up letters. And we just, you know, ours happens to come from the Phoenician alphabet, which is developed by the Phoenicians long ago. And so that's the one we use in our culture here in the United States. But as we've noticed in discussing that cat, other cultures use different languages, right? They use different alphabets and have entirely different systems of putting these symbols together. So these letters, though, are just symbolic. They're representative of something else. And they draw their shared meaning from just that, the shared meaning. They draw their meaning from our shared understanding of what they mean. So language in and of itself is symbolic. It's just representative of some other idea, but we have that shared understanding that brings us to that sort of central meaning. Language is not the only thing that's symbolic about communication, however. Nonverbal communication is also symbolic, right? We could take a look at some of our facial gestures or, you know, facial expressions or gestures or postures and things like that. And those are representative, but they're symbolic as well. Now, there are some that we now kind of have universal, we draw universal meanings from, but in a lot of ways, those change from culture to culture as well. And it's not just our expressions and things like that. We have symbols, other symbols that are representative of an idea. They are symbolic as well, right? They represent an idea and other things represent a specific type of brand or product or something like that. And are so specifically identified with that item that they also have become symbolic of that particular product or that particular idea, that particular service. So all of these things though are, again, underscore the idea that communication is symbolic. It's not predestined. It's not sent down from on high. It's not magical or anything of that sort. It's just, is what it is because we decided that's what it would be. It is symbolic. It's representative, but still those symbols have a real power. They have real power, but because communication is symbolic, because it's just kind of, we determined, we decided at some point this is going to represent this. There's also room for interpretation in there, right? There's differences in the way that we see these symbols and what they represent and how they should be interpreted. So symbols then are subjective. Many, many symbols, if not all symbols are subjective. The meaning rests in the person who is interpreting that and determining what it means. So as part of this, we need to understand that all symbols have both a denotative and a connotative meaning. The denotative meaning is what we would call the dictionary definition of that word or that symbol. What does it mean if we looked that up in the dictionary? What would it say? What's the kind of universally identified meaning of that particular symbol, that particular word, that particular graphic symbol, that particular expression? What would it be if we looked it up in the dictionary? That's the denotative meaning. We're all kind of singular. We're all on the same page with that, right? The other type of meaning is the connotative meaning. And really that depends on the person and how they interpret it. It depends on how it happens to go through their psychological process and their senses and their frame of reference. So the connotative meaning can vary from person to person. Years ago, there was a representation put forth by Ogden and Richards called the semantic triangle. That kind of represents this idea of the different meanings that a symbol can have. And so the semantic triangle is just that. It's a triangle. It says there are three kind of aspects to every symbol. The first is the symbol itself. So if we just took the symbol H-O-M-E, put it together, it says home, right? That's our shared understanding that those symbols, when they're put together in that order, they are pronounced home and they mean home. And so a home could be, you know, this house, this structure that we have, that we live in. Four walls and a door and a roof and where you go at the end of the day and where you sleep and so forth. That's a home, right? That's the denotative definition. So we have the symbol, then we have the denotative definition of that, which would be, you know, this building, the structure that we live in is a home. But then for other people, home is, you know, home is where the heart is. Home is wherever your family's at. Home is, you know, where we find comfort and where we hang out with the people that we love, right? That's home. For some people, that's the connotative meaning though, right? Because that meaning is subjective. That may be true for some people, but for other people, they see the same symbol, home, and we have the same denotative definition, the structure where we live, right? But for some people, home is not that happy place where, you know, home is where the heart is. This is, you know, home is where mom and dad fight or home is where I don't feel accepted or don't feel wanted or loved or whatever. So home can have a different meaning for different people. And that's the connotative meaning of that. One last example here. If we said baseball, took the, took the symbols, baseball, all these letters constructed in this fashion pronounced this way of baseball. We would, we would think of both the, the ball itself and the game that people play, right? Nine players in the field, one at bat, three strikes, four balls, three outs burning, so forth. But then for, for, depending on who you ask for some people, baseball is going to be this really source of excitement and joy because we love baseball. And maybe that stems from playing baseball as a youngster. Maybe it stems from going to baseball games with your family or doing whatever. For whatever reason, we have all these, you know, internal connections to baseball.   I just remember having to go to my siblings' games or forced to, it's just, it just takes too long and I don't like to watch it or whatever. We have all these connotative connections, the word baseball as well, right? So whether you like baseball, whether you don't like baseball, the denotative definition is something we could agree on. If we looked it up in the dictionary, whether you like it or don't, baseball is the ball itself and baseball is the game and it has those specific rules. That's the denotative definition. Then connotatively though, we're all on different pages. Everyone of us is going to have a slightly different interpretation of that symbol because it's subjective. Interestingly, language is, of course, in itself connected to a particular culture and a particular context. It is bound by culture and context to certain frames. So for example, if we just take a look at language, the symbols of that language can change. Now, some are going to be stable over time, but others are going to come and go, right? So we have, just for example, some of this pop slang from the 2000s. These are words that were very popular at different times in the 2000s, maybe for 15 minutes, maybe for a little longer than that. But there's stuff now we don't really use. We don't really use the term bootylicious anymore. Incredibly popular for the time that song was out. We don't really talk about, we don't use the term cray anymore. I wish we said awesome sauce more. I really like that one, but that one came and went pretty quickly. So these are just pop slang. They were bound to that time and that culture. They were bound by that context. They were appropriate at that time and understood at that time. Now they would be considered out of fashion and not very popular, not very useful. Again, subjectivity. These were popular at the time. Now they've been determined to be not so popular. So this leads us to an interesting discussion too about what's called the Saper Worf Hypothesis. The Saper Worf Hypothesis has to do with what we call linguistic relativity. The idea that you can kind of look at a culture and determine what's important to that culture by looking at their language. And what kind of words and how many words they have for something. For example, the famous example is that the Eskimos have however many words for snow. Some people say 50, some people say 100 and 150, whatever. They have a lot of words for snow that all mean snow, right? And why is that? Why do they have so many words that mean snow? Well, it's because snow is such an important part of their lives. They need to be able to differentiate between the different types of snow because it's going to have a real impact on what they're doing and it's going to have an impact on their day-to-day lives, right? And depending on where you live, that may be more or less true. I live in the Midwest and kind of the northern part of the Midwest. So we get a fair amount of snow here. We have several words. We don't have 100 words for snow, I don't think, but we have several.  Those are all different types of snow that are going to have an impact on my day the next day, right? What kind of driving conditions are we going to have? Am I going to need to plan on not going anywhere tomorrow? Do I need to order, you know, lots of milk and bread and eggs because we're going to be snowed in for several days because of a blizzard? There are different terms, but if you live in the south, the southern part of the United States, you might not have quite as many words for snow because it doesn't impact you quite the same way, right? So the same is true in a larger context in our culture. For example, how many words do we have for money that all represent money? I bet you we could come up with a couple dozen just off the top of our head words that all mean essentially money that represent the idea of money, right? But what about the word love? How many words do we have for the word love? I mean, not really very many, right? We use love kind of universally because I say I love my mom, right? Which is nice. I love my mom. I also say I love Taco Bell, which is true. I do love Taco Bell. Hopefully, I mean, my mom probably hopes that that's not true, you know, the same way, but I don't have a different word for loving Taco Bell than I do for loving my mom. I have one word, love, but if I wanted to explain money, I have all kinds of words, right? So what does that tell somebody who's not from our culture about our culture? It gives them an idea of the importance of money. You know, really, for better or for worse, the importance of money because we have so many words for it, right? So many ways to describe it. And yet only really one word that means love. So anyway, an interesting thought there about the Saper Worf hypothesis and understanding linguistic relativity. But these are all subjective. And you go to a different culture, money would have fewer definitions, and love would have more, right? More uses, more, maybe a variety of words that all mean different kinds of love, right? That what I could differentiate between the love that I have for my mom and love that I have for Taco Bell. So symbols are subjective. They are subjective. They don't mean the same thing to every person. So we need to keep that in mind when we're trying to persuade and when we're communicating in general, but for our purposes, when we're trying to persuade. So what are some of the effective use of symbols? What are some ways that we can use symbols effectively in our efforts to persuade and to understand persuasion? Well, first of all, we can understand the difference between precision and vagueness, right? We can use language with the specific amount of precision or vagueness that we need to. And sometimes we look at this as what we say, the ladder of abstraction, right? And we need to be very intentional about this, though. If we want somebody to have a very specific understanding of what we're talking about, then we should use precise language and precise symbols.  But we need to understand what other people are doing that as well when they're using precision versus vagueness and what that may imply and what that may mean and what we need to pursue as a result of that. We can also talk about imagery.  So if I were looking at, if I were trying to describe this, for example, a scene for an audience, I could just say, you know, it's a wagon path in the middle of a cornfield. And that would be accurate. But if I'm going to create some imagery, I really want to put this into their soul. I could say the worn dirt path packed down from decades of faithful service divides row after row of tall corn stalks, each a part of the lifeblood that will fuel the world's food demands. That's a little different, right? We're painting a picture here. We're really pressing this into the audience's soul and giving it real life as opposed to just saying, you know, it's a wagon path in the middle of a cornfield. That's not very exciting. But man, we could really use language and use symbols to, and even just using this picture as opposed to saying a cornfield. We can use this picture. I mean, it's really kind of beautiful if you're in that kind of thing. It really puts the audience all in the same place that we can use this imagery to persuade. We also need to be aware that others are going to do that as well. So we need to understand the purpose of imagery in persuasion. Identification is one of the things, you know, Kenneth Burke talks a lot about identification. We mentioned Kenneth Burke earlier. Identification means connecting with that audience, using language to find common ground with that audience and find common ground with that person and use that as a persuasive tactic and, you know, inroads for persuasion there as well. We can talk about branding as an effective use of symbols. We can get away from language here for a little bit and just talk about symbols. What are some of the brands that you know just based on their logo? Just based on their logo. It's iconic, right? So, I mean, there's one of these that is recognizable and the other is not. Excuse me, right? One that we know and one that we don't. One that we care for and one that we trust and one that we don't. Same here. One that we know and we care for and we value that brand over some others and one that we don't necessarily, right? And these are just examples of iconic branding symbols that have value behind them, right? So, we can use these brands and different understandings of what those brands represent to persuade effectively. We can use unification. This is sort of connected identification, but we can unify an audience based on symbols. Again, not even language just based on symbols. What about the flag? I mean, the flag unites us all, right? The flag is something that we feel proudly of and is representative of us as a culture. And so we know what it means. We know what it represents, this idea. And again, that could change from person to person exactly what it represents or what it means. But we have this idea of what this flag is and what it means and what it represents, right? So, unification is another effective use of symbols. Another way that we can use symbols to persuade. We can also use symbols in not so great ways. We can misuse symbols in many ways. And this happens frequently. So, when we misuse symbols, we're using it to more manipulate than persuade, but we need to be aware of these types of things as well. Things like doublespeak. When we use a term to kind of cover the real meaning of something or to soften something, almost euphemistically soften something. So, when we see images of tanks and things like that but politicians don't want to say, we need these war machines. So, they call them maybe instruments of peace. Instruments of peace, right? This is how we keep the peace with other nations is by having this type of technology. That's why we need a strong defense. These are instruments of peace. I mean, that's some pretty good doublespeak, right? Because these are machines of war and that doesn't make them any less necessary. But when we call them instruments of peace, that's not really an accurate description of what we're getting at here. So, we need to be aware of and cautious about using doublespeak. We also need to watch trigger words and be aware of trigger words, right? Words that will have intensified meaning for specific audiences and for specific people. So, for example, here recently, the QAnon thought process or I don't know what you want to call it. I would call it the QAnon conspiracy but the QAnon, you know, ideals have come to the forefront here in the last few weeks and months and they have some specific trigger words. Words that if you talk to somebody who's a believer in that type of thing, that will kind of have a special meaning to them. So, when we think about the QAnon, we think about words like fake news, socialist, patriot. The storm is one of their big ones.  You know, pizza is kind of a trigger word when you talk to them. So, they have these words, though, that when you mention these, they get really fired up and they have significant meaning to them and people will use that to their advantage, too. People will use that, well, if you're a patriot, then you'll do this. And for QAnon people, that's really important. If you want to support the storm, if you want to bring the storm to the forefront, you know, saying things like that will get a specific and intensified reaction from people in that world. Hate speech is another misuse of symbols. When we use hate speech, it's a misuse of symbols. It's, you know, it's just a terrible way to gain attention and to really divert from your persuasive message, but really bring attention to something else. So, hate speech would be another misuse of symbols and then appropriation, right? For example, the swastika is one of the oldest symbols in the world. It's been used for thousands of years to represent a variety of different ideas. The swastika in different forms has different meanings, right? But the only one we really know anymore is this one, right? Because the Nazis kind of appropriated the swastika. That's certainly the most prevalent use of it. And the one with the most meaning for us in contemporary times is that we associate the swastika with Nazi Germany despite the fact that it has lots of other meanings, too. In many cases, I would argue that the American flag has been appropriated. Get up and go back to this kind of idea of the pro-Trump Patriots, so to speak, this kind of movement, the pro-Trump movement following the election in 2020. They stopped the steal and so forth. Really appropriated the American flags. You saw these people as they were storming the Capitol waving the American flag around appropriating it for their use, saying that we are patriots. This is why we are right because we are patriots. And then you see a guy using the flag to literally beat a police officer during that time. They've appropriated and taken over that flag and given it a different meaning in that sense. It doesn't necessarily totally diminish it for everybody, but, gosh, they really have in some ways tainted the use of that symbol. What do we do with all this? We need to be analyzing these symbols. As persuaders we need to use them wisely and use them ethically, but we also need to be on the lookout for these and be able to analyze different symbols. There are a variety of ways we can do that. One of the more famous one is what we call Burke's Pentad which is developed by Kenneth Burke who's a famous researcher and scholar in the area of language and persuasion in particular. And so he developed what he called the Pentad. The Dramatist Pentad. And it just looks like this. It has five points. That's why it's called the Pentad.  There's a person or a group who take action in the scene. Whatever you're looking at, whatever you're reading, who's the person or the group that is taking action in that scene. That's the agent. Then the act is whatever they're doing, any motivated or purposeful action that they're taking in that scene. The agency is the tool or method or means that are used to accomplish their ends. What is it they're using to achieve that purpose? Their purpose then is the reason why they're doing what they're doing. And the scene is where all of this is taking place. So you have these five points of the Pentad. Right? So then we could take a look at just an ad, for example. It's an ad for Clariton. So you can see what's happening here. We have a man and his puppy. That's who's in the scene. We have the act, which is them playing outside. The agency is just kind of rolling around in the grass, and that's what they're trying to achieve.  And the scene is the Parker field.  They didn't pick that for no reason. An adorable puppy. So the man and his puppy are the agent. The act, in addition to just playing outside, the act is the freedom to live life.  Right? The agency, not just rolling around in the grass, but is that there are no restrictions or limits. That's the message you're trying to send here. You are not restricted. When you take Clariton, you are not restricted by being outside and by being around a dog and by being in the grass and so forth. The purpose here is not just enjoying time with your dog, but being uninhibited by allergies. Clariton helps you be uninhibited by allergies. And the scene, more than just being a Parker field or wherever they're at is wherever you want to be. That's the whole point, right? You can live your life with Clariton. You are not restricted. You don't have those limits. So you can be wherever you want to be.  What about the, you know, between the scene and the agency? What's the connection there? And what's the divide? What's the balance between those things? And you could do that for all of these, these areas of the pentad comparing two of them at a time and so forth. But really just examining, okay, what's the deeper meaning here? What's the deeper sense of the act and the agency and so forth looking at each of these areas and trying to really understand what's happening. So Burke's pentad is one way that you can analyze symbols of any kind, words, you know, ads, any kind, any symbol whatsoever you could examine through Burke's pentad. You could also take a step back and use what we've talked about in a previous video, things like Aristotle's modes of persuasion, right? Ethos, pathos, and logos. When we hear somebody persuade or when we see some sort of persuasive symbol or any kind of symbol at all, we can look at it and say, okay, what's the ethos here? Who is the person providing this? What's the organization providing this? What is their character? What is their competence? What do they know about this? What do I know about them? We can look at the pathos. How are they trying to appeal to my emotions here? In what ways are they doing that? In what ways are they appealing to my logical appeals, to my, you know, to my senses, my sensibility in my mind? How is all this unfolding? And what does all that mean? Are they doing so ethically? Are they doing so in a way that's appropriate? Are they doing so in a way that's effective for me, but understanding those things is important? So we could look at it through the eyes of Aristotle's modes of persuasion. We could also look at it another one we talked about is Cicero's principles, right? Cicero's principles for persuasion. First, you know, the invention or discovery of evidence and arguments, where did these things come from for this person or this group? Where are their arguments coming from? Where did they discover this information? What's the background here? How did they organize this information? Are they are they doing so ethically? Are they organizing this information in an appropriate way? What's the stylization, the artistic stylization that they're using here? What kind of spin are they putting on it? Are they using memorization? And this is kind of an old-fashioned one, but are they using memorization? And then finally, are they delivering it in a skillful way? And is that persuading me more than the facts itself? Am I being persuaded because they seem to be smooth, because they seem to know what it's about, because they're wearing a nice suit or they're well put together? Is that having a stronger or heavier weight than it should? We could look at all these things and kind of dissect this persuasion and analyze it and determine whether or not we're being persuaded in an appropriate way or an inappropriate way or whether we should follow that persuasion in general. So all of this is to say that we need to remember that persuasion is really about symbols. It comes down to symbols and how effectively people are using them. And we need to be sure that when we are persuading that we are doing so in an ethical way, that we're using symbols effectively and also ethically and appropriately. And that when we are encountering persuasion that we are doing so critically and analyzing those symbols, what does that mean and what's the deeper meaning here or the sense of why they're doing what they're doing and who's doing this persuading and so forth. There are lots of things we can look at when we encounter persuasion. So we need to be aware of that and be critical receivers as well. If you have questions about any of this information, use and misuse and analysis of symbols or anything to do with persuasion at all, don't hesitate to email me. I'd love to hear from you from on email and communicate with you that way. So feel free to send me any questions to my email. In the meantime, do be on the lookout for that persuasion and do be aware of your own persuasive acts because they are very, very powerful. We need to be doing so responsibly and also be responsible receivers of that persuasion. So be on the lookout and be a more critical receiver of that persuasion as well as a more appropriate and ethical persuader.


In 2021, Kat Von D announced she would be closing her famous tattoo parlor in Los Angeles after 14 years and moving to Indiana for a quieter life with her husband Rafael Reyes and their three-year-old son. It should come as no surprise then that Kat has placed her Gothic Victorian mansion in Hancock Park up for sale at $15 million, which she's renovated and added many unique features including a blood-read swimming pool. However, Kat has made sure her new digs in Indiana are no less interesting considering she bought the historic Shink mansion, which spans over 12,000 square feet of space and is known to be haunted. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Catherine von Drachenberg, aka Kat Von D, is a Mexican-American tattoo artist turned cosmetics entrepreneur and more who became a household name while starring on the reality series LA Inc. While her Los Angeles tattoo parlor high voltage is famous, it's time for a change and she's excited for a new life in Indiana with her husband and their son. Kat said about her new life, We recently purchased a beautiful home on a bit of land in rural Indiana and the more time we spend out there we realize we feel more at home there than we do here in LA. After much thought, we have decided we will permanently be moving to Indiana at the end of this year. With a net worth of 30 million dollars, Kat could have chosen any Indiana mansion she wanted, but as you might expect, the star is moving into the reportedly haunted Shink mansion, which she snagged for over 1.5 million dollars. Hey guys, it's Keira the Vampire Slayer back with another exclusive house tour here in Famous Entertainment, this one looking at the Victorian mansions of Kat Von D. Don't forget to like, subscribe and hit me up on Instagram to chat and now let's get into this video. In 2021, Kat announced she would be closing her famed Los Angeles Tattoo Parlor High Voltage after 14 years in business, moving across the country to Indiana with her family. That being said, in January 2022, Kat also put her Gothic style Victorian mansion on the market for 15 million dollars, which is located in the historic Windsor Square neighborhood of LA. Her house was built back in the 1890s by businessman and rancher Isaac Newton Van Nuys, who's the founder of the nearby Van Nuys neighborhood. Then, the historic home was moved to its present day location in 1915 by his son, later appearing in the 2003 movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Kat snagged the mansion back in 2016 for 6.5 million dollars and proceeded to give the three-story house a completely gothic renovation, adding a stage and theater room with wet bar on the third floor, a hidden speakeasy with hand-carved walls and a blood-red pool and spa out on the ground. Inside the stunning mansion, there's over 12,500 square feet of space with 13 bedrooms and 10 baths along with 7 fireplaces. Before walking in, the mansion's brick exterior has been decked out in a dark red color, boasting an impressive turret, and is tucked behind a detailed wrought iron gate and hedges. The grand entryway leads into the stunning common rooms, including a wood-paneled living room with high ceilings and ornate fireplace, as well as a wood-paneled library or study with another fireplace. These rooms both have beautiful high ceilings with impressive chandeliers, along with stately furniture to match. Nearby rooms included dining room with stained glass windows and a ton of red accents, much like the other spaces, and a sprawling French style ballroom or formal living room with painted ceiling. Even the kitchen has a gothic design from the abundance of matching dark woods and even in the snack bar seating, there are also vintage chic appliances here. Altogether, Kat's Victorian Mansion has plenty of rooms, anchored by dark wood flooring, detailed and carved walls, as well as gold-tinted ceilings and opulent chandeliers. In fact, many of the rooms are dripping in gold and metallics, giving the space a royal feel. There are five bedrooms on the second floor, along with multiple luxury en suites, and a few of them almost look like you're in an actual palace. All of the bedrooms are regal, but my personal fave has to be the one with the large detailed fireplace in one corner and the plush red curtains and accents. I also love the bedroom with the gloomy mural on the walls, but all of the bedrooms possess their own personality, which is cool. Even the bathrooms in Kat's Mansion are beautiful with polished marble floors and other fancy details, especially the black and gold bathroom, which looks like the master. Aside from all the cool amenities in Kat's Gothic abode, there's also an additional two bedroom guest department on top of the garage, which also has a turntable driveway at the front. To match Kat's vision for her moody mansion, she even made the swimming pool and spa out back off her blood red colored water, while surrounding patio was decorated with stately statues. I don't know about you guys, but this has got to be one of my favorite celebrity mentions we looked at. While Kat is moving on from that home, you shouldn't expect anything less spooky from her new place, so let's take a look. Property records reveal that Kat purchased this home in Vive, Indiana in December 2020 with her mother and her sister for just over 1.5 million dollars. She's also said that she has plans to most likely open a private studio in Indiana once the renovations on their residence are complete. Kat's new property is also a famous one in the area, known as the Shank Mansion and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Not only is it historic, it's said to be haunted. Built in the 1700s, the grand vintage home was designed by Cincinnati architect George P. Humphries for the Shank family. More specifically, the father, who is a successful businessman, he had it constructed for his son, Benjamin Franklin Shank. Benjamin only spent two years in the mega mansion before passing away. Restoration of the property happened between 1998 and 2000, but as you might have guessed, Kat will be renovating the mansion as well to fit her tastes. It's already gone through a lot of changes over the years, serving as everything from an event space for the Indiana Baptist Convention, then rental apartments, and even a bed and breakfast. Standing over 12,000 square feet of space inside and 10.6 acres of land, Kat's new residence has some amazing features, such as a four-story tower, a window watch or attic, seven balconies, 13 fireplaces, and four porches. The mansion also has a whopping 35 rooms throughout, seven of which are bedrooms and six baths with two half baths. While there's a ton of space, the historic home even comes complete and fully furnished, including the original antiques dishes and silverware. If Kat was able to make her Los Angeles mansion so unique and gothic, I can only imagine what she'll be able to do with this actual haunted house. Five of the bathrooms in the residence boast the original copper lines and walnut tubs, which are only a taste of the antique features in the house. Aside from all the bedrooms, there's also a bonus innkeeper's apartment. The formal rooms all offer soaring and stately ceilings, while there are common areas like a grand entryway and vintage yet stylish kitchen. Outside of Kat's Indiana mansion, there's a patio overlooking what's called a water garden, and there are other expansive decks and verandas on the property too. The stunning estate is full of gardens, multiple fountains and waterfalls, as well as a vineyard and a gazebo. As I mentioned, it's well known that the shank mansion is haunted. In fact, it's said to be one of the most haunted spots in all of Indiana. Legends said the mansion was built over the ruins of an older structure that burnt down in a fire where a couple was also trapped inside. Those guests who stayed here when it was a bed and breakfast also have noted presence of six to seven other guests, aka ghosts, and single male visitors were often woken up at night by ghostly kisses. Stories of lights mysteriously flickering and unsourced sounds throughout the mansion were persistent. In the words of Michelle Thompson, shanks former innkeeper, there are things that just happened. Well, I for one can't wait to see if Kat has any haunted stories for us once she takes up residence here. Alright, so that brings us to the end of our Kat Von D House tour. I'm ending it on a spooky note, but I for one can't wait to see what she does with her new mansion in Indiana. Looking at both this place and her Gothic LA mansion, I think Kat has some of the coolest properties I've ever seen. I wish I could live at either of those homes. What did you guys think? Too creepy for you or perfect? And what about that blood red pool? Be sure to let me know your thoughts on Kat's properties down in the comments. Thanks for watching, don't forget to follow me over on Instagram, and I will see you all in the next video. Bye!


Europe and the European Union have been undergoing a lot of contradictions recently. And at the centre of all these contradictions and crises is the country of Poland. So on the one hand we've had the fact that Poland has been on a clash with the European Union about its judicial system, about the fact that its abortion laws, its laws regarding the LGBT community are extremely oppressive. We in fact recently saw an incident where due to very regressive abortion law, a woman died, a woman in her thirties died because she could not get the abortion at the right time. There have been mass protests in Poland over this issue as well as on the issue of LGBT rights. And these issues have been condemned by the European Union. On the other hand Poland has also become a bit of a front line as refugees from Belarus have been moving towards Poland. Now there are many refugees, a few hundred refugees on the border between Poland and Belarus. Poland has apparently detained some of these refugees. It has heavily militarised its borders. It is a very crisis like situation. On this point though the European Union is very much on Poland's side. How do we make sense of all these contradictions? How do we understand Poland's relationship with the EU? And what is the position of the EU in general? We'll be discussing all this in Mapping Fault Lines. We're joined by Prabir Pulkaj sir. Like I said there's a lot of issues around this one small country but let's maybe take one issue that is right now in the headlines or grabbing the headlines which is the issue of refugees itself. Now we know that many European countries have a very problematic attitude to say the least about refugees. Poland falling perfectly in that category and despite all the EU's disagreements with Poland the EU has jumped to the country's defence. So how do we understand on the one hand this issue of refugees itself and generally the kind of positions Poland is taking? You know what you said about Poland being a front line state against Belarus and Russia on one hand. On the other hand the fractures it has with the European Union with respect to a number of human rights issues and of course one of the central issues which has been there for a long time is the abortion rights issue. It's interesting that the refugee issue has come to occupy currently the centre stage in the way that European Union completely Poland on this issue and also claimed that Belarus and Mr Putin himself I don't know how they will see reach that conclusion is behind this attempt to embarrass Poland by pushing refugees into European Union of which members one of the member states is of course Poland. Though as you've also said the courts the constitutional court in European Union has said Poland is in violation of the EU charter and therefore they should be penalised by X pounds per X euros per day and so on. So that battle continues of what the inward trajectory of Poland is and what European Union claims its democratic values are. But behind this and the refugee issue we should also add one more point. Here is Poland who actually sent troops as a part of NATO to Afghanistan. They also as other European countries behind the destruction of Libya and also the runious war that was imposed on Syria Bashar al-Assad's government. Now all of that of course creates refugees, Iraq invasion creates refugees. Now what they're willing to do is to destroy these countries through war and at the same time say that if the refugees they should not enter European Union. We have the right to send soldiers anywhere in the world we want fight any war we want of course in company of the United States generally not alone. But the pushback the blowback should not come to European Union. This is one part. The US has protection. Why? Because the US has oceans surrounding it. It's really a continental sized island if you will. Now given that it is protected by oceans European Union is not. It's a part of the Eurasian land mass and of course if whether you take Afghanistan, whether you take Syria, whether you take Lebanon, Libya or even other countries in that region which is facing semi-wars or breakups of the countries themselves that they of course do tend to go towards European Union. Because as refugees they think their condition would still be better than being in the midst of a war-torned country. Given this European Union of course now is saying how Belarus is the culprit but they're not willing to accept their ruinous wars, their invasions has anything to do with the refugee problem and in this particular case the refugees have come from Syria. So again this is the same war on Syria which led to Turkish saying that European Union will have to accommodate the refugees. We can't take more than one million that we already have so where will the rest go? They should go to European Union and of course European Union essentially paid a huge bribe to Turkey in order to not to let that happen. So Belarus is really in some sense called their bluff by saying okay you have this humanitarian policies. Some people are coming here, they want to go to European Union, why should we stop them? Of course they have come by flight, they booked the tickets and they want to go to European Union. What is our role in this? Now we can call it hypocrisy probably is but nevertheless it shows them the much bigger hypocrisy of the European Union. Absolutely. In this context of course Poland also part of another controversy which is regarding a very important issue which is natural gas supplies, the energy future of the entire European continent itself. So we've talked about this before especially while discussing the Nord Stream Pipelines, the role Ukraine, Poland etc. playing. And even now on this issue there seems to be some amount of you know back and forth and attempt to actually target Russia once again by both Ukraine and Poland in different ways. So can you talk a bit about that as well? Ukraine as you said we have talked about Ukraine claims that Russia should send more gas through Ukraine also give it more gas and it should not send gas to Nord Stream as much as it is doing right now. Ukraine gets a share of the cut that's really the argument as transit fees. Russia has said whatever we have committed we have said we are not cutting down anything. So when is the question of sending more through Ukraine arise? So this is the Ukrainian picture and again these are the same set of people who would like to fight with Russia but want the transit fees because their economy is at a stage which is very critical and the only free money they can get unless they get it from EU is going to be to transit taxes that they impose on Russia and European Union for transferring gas. Coming to Poland and that's it again even more interesting question because Poland has gone to court against an agreement it itself has reached it had reached with Russia regarding gas supplies and it said it was too high and the European Union the European Union court gave a judgment saying it violates EU laws which says you can't have long term contracts like this it has to be based virtually on the spot market or variations thereof. Therefore this contract is void and the amount of money that Russia had to pay as a consequence as damages quite high it is in billions of dollars or billions of euros whatever you want to call the currency there. So now Poland has taken a position that here the price of gas has gone up now we want to return to the agreement which we had opposed from which we got actually money penalty because what they are being forced to pay now as spot prices means it's much higher and in effect whatever penalty Russia might have paid they are getting more money out of Poland today. By virtue of Poland walking out of the contract not only walking out of the contract going and claiming damages and reparations from Russia for high prices of that contract. So it's interesting when it suits you want you want to go back to the contract but when it didn't suit you because you have to pay higher prices then you don't want that contract. The essential argument that countries those who are gas producers have been saying is gas prices should not be based on spot pricing but they need to be based on longer term pricing for the simple reason gas prices can go up and down. But the infrastructure required to supply gas or produce gas both of them have to need or require stability of prices and that's that is why long term forward contracts were reached. Now this is the market fundamentalism that even when everybody understands that gas and oil require infrastructure therefore require a certain stability. They are not like everyday commodities therefore this pricing should not follow the pricing for say soaps this part of it is not understood by quote unquote economists who believe that everything should be treated as a commodity based on supply and demand and the most efficient allocation of resources is to such supply and demand pricing except that if you have a shortage because it's an essential commodity you require it for heating if you are in a cold country otherwise you freeze we saw that in Texas. And this is the essential issue whether it's electricity and that was the Texas case or it is the question of natural gas these require longer term framing of the pricing issue rather than the spot market. We saw the disaster in Texas earlier we had the similar disaster based on Enron's influence Maline influence in California that is United States the headquarters shall we say of market economics. Now we have the same case in Eastern Europe and Poland like crying foul when it has to pay a high price and demanding that it should be allowed to anchor its price to the spot market when the prices go low having your cake and eating it too. Absolutely. Premier in this context also finally an important question about the European Union itself one of the aspects we talked about is the fact that the European Union is going all over the place in terms of positions on the one hand there is or there was at least some attempt to engage with Russia on the other hand support for countries like Poland rivalries are issues with countries like Poland how does the EU deal with the United States. So all these questions really you know coming to the fore even as Angela Merkel is now left she was one of the pillars of the European project as it is. So how do we see the European Union's position it stands and its relative strength today and what really is the way ahead for it. European Union politically seems to be not clear whether it is coming or going if you see what its relationship with the United States is does it want to remain as a NATO partner and part of a military block. Does it see its future in Eurasia economically that's where it seems to be otherwise going because already you have the you have the Belt Road Initiative which connects it to China you have the gas grid gas pipelines which connects it to Russia for hydrocarbon resources. Whatever you talk about LNG the question is LNG will always be against spot pricing. So therefore it's much more likely to be stable if you rely on the gas grid and the gas infrastructure but that's Russia. So does its future lie with Russia China economically while of course there will be competition because after all there's independent countries and EU still a big economic block still manufactures a whole bunch of things which of course others other countries will lead. So what how does it see this relationship while also reflecting on the fact that militarily as long as Soviet Union was there that it was a really a part of NATO and the frontline state vis-a-vis United States and Soviet Union and in that the border really was at that time the socialist block. Now socialist block has fallen apart a bunch of countries on the borders of Russia are quite anti-Russia they were probably not very pro-socialist either because number of the countries had very strong right wing forces aligned with Germany during the war whether it's Croatia whether it is even a section of Poland for that matters and of course Ukraine is a well known example. So if you take all of that into account European Union has to determine what its position vis-a-vis now the Belt Road initiative or Russia is does it look Eurasia wise or does it look towards the Atlantic and that is the problem that they have. They started as Atlantic pass because they were all sea pass really that's where the colonial empires came from but now the colonial empires are not there. The relationship with the United States what is the stake they have in going with the United States is an open question because militarily they may think they have okay they have this umbrella of the United States which is why Trump wanted more money from them that protection money we protect him. But at the same time the United States is no longer a manufacturing power so economically where do they go is the question and I think this is the crux of the matter. We saw for instance Macron recently being very unhappy because of the submarine deal they are trying to put that behind them the US deal. But if we look at it Germany is of course as you said the linchpin of the European project the EU project and Germany we have a hawk who is a Green Party member who wants to nuke Russia for some reason or the other. He said we should be prepared to use nuclear bombs. Now you know the essential point that has come time and again in this kind of discussion is the nuclear weapon is an unusable weapon because if you do then the retaliatory strike will destroy the whole of human civilization. So this is a well known principle on the basis of which we have always argued and countries have accepted de facto if not de jure America never accepted this position on paper. That first strike is not something that can work and therefore the so called balance of terror and therefore the so called you know the arms limitation treaties. They never agreed to arms disarmament but arms limitation and also giving up defensive shields because then if you give up defensive if you put in defensive shields the possibility of offensive weapons and new offensive weapons arise. This all infrastructure of thinking and I'm not going to call it only of treaties but the infrastructure of thinking how we thought the basis of that architecture of thinking is being given up when we have Germany. Not exactly a nuclear power. Does it have nuclear bombs saying that they should NATO should use obviously maybe France's bombs or American bombs to use nuclear bombs against Russia for some if a war takes place. So this whole argument that the need first use is actually qualitatively something which is new and this also seems to be anchored to the question you're raising. Is it that they're trying to who those Baltic states or Poland, Hungary who are the borders closer to Russia saying we are as much as hawkish as the Americans are. So is it competitive politics of trying to keep this new new entrance to EU and possibly future partners to EU. Is it therefore a part of competition with China and Russia aligning with the United States or do they look forward to a different Eurasian arrangement in which at the moment the United States is wooing all these right wing countries on the borders of Russia to be a part of their larger NATO project. So I think Germany as you have rightly said is not clear where it wants to be and I would say it's a fundamentally the choice of European Union countries is do they want peace and economic growth for Eurasia or do they want competition and military competition is that the key that's a key issue before them. And at the moment it's not clear that Europe has a leadership. European Union has a leadership which can really strike a new path for itself. Thank you so much. Thank you Praveer. We'll be keeping track of all these issues on mapping fault lines in the coming weeks. Until then keep watching news click.


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