Christy is out representing us down at DockerCon this week. So I'm going to do my best to fill her shoes. Just a quick update. This is recorded in our next meeting. It will be December 6th, as will be skipping November, since we'll all hopefully be at KubeCon or watching virtually if you're not able to attend in person. As I noted, this call will be recorded. You can find the slides in the marketing committee. Slides folder and all recordings will be available on YouTube post call. This is the LF anti-trust policy. Let's be sure to keep the lawyers out of everything and keep our actions well. So just a reminder for everyone on that portion of it. So today, we're going to discuss the road to KubeCon 2024 election kickoff, projects updates, CNCF team updates, and then key takeaways. So to kick us off on the road to KubeCon, I'm going to hand it over to Celia. Oh, wait. This is actually a sorry, Celia. No worries. Go ahead. I'll start it off here. So just a few key highlighted items, sessions, and activities you don't want to miss. We have some really great sessions at KubeCon as we do every year. But some ones that you don't want to miss out on is a lightning talk about empowering the deaf and hard of hearing in cloud native and open source community. That's a new initiative that's came out in the last, I'd say, six months. And it's going to be a really great initiative for us to continue to make this space inclusive for all. So this is a great session for all of you to check out. Roadmap to becoming a CNCF ambassador. That's going to be another great one that's just talking about how your experiences can play a role in becoming an ambassador and what that program looks like and how it can advance your career. The Empower us lunch, which is on a first come, first serve basis. And then lastly, the documentary film for EBPF unlocking the kernel, which is going to be another great film that we have debuting at this conference. It was well received last year, our last KubeCon having a documentary debuting. And we're kind of continuing forward with that with our projects. Another thing to note is that we will have marketing office hours. We encourage all of you to stop by, ask your questions, meet us in person. So feel free to take a look at when those office hours are open throughout the week and then also where we'll be located. Another thing to note while we're talking about the schedule, we want you to join us for an Architect Your Schedule live session. So Architect Your Schedule and begin building yours for the week. We have our ambassadors and some special guests joining us tomorrow for a live stream at 9 AM Pacific time. So if you're interested in kind of hearing what our ambassadors and other people in the community are looking forward to when it comes to sessions at KubeCon North America, feel free to join that session. It's a great place to kind of get started thinking about your journey while you're in Chicago. And then lastly, we'll have the Marketing Committee and CNCF Projects Team happy hour. So join us on November 6 from 4 to 5 at the Marriott Marquis. We would love to have you all there. You can send one to two representatives from each company. So if you're going to be on site or you have colleagues that are on site, feel free to send them on over and take this time to meet our team as well as the Projects Team. That was a lot. So any questions at this time before we move into discussions? So moving on to 2024 Marketing Committee elections, I want to take this moment to thank Lori and give her a moment to kind of wrap up her time as a marketing co-chair. So thank you. And I don't know if you all saw on LinkedIn, but yesterday was my last day with JFrog. So I will not be finishing out my term with CNCF because it is a member position. But I do want to thank everybody at CNCF, the marketing team specifically. Y'all run a super tight ship. And I'm not leaving 100%. I am still going to be working with George and Katie on the Projects Working Group, which is really cool and fun. And we'll talk about it a little bit later on. But I highly recommend if this is something that you're thinking about, I highly recommend you running. The CNCF is great in terms of supporting you and what your initiatives are. This is an awesome committee to be a part of. And I think over the last few years, I've just seen it grow in terms of contributions from the members and really trying to help push everything forward in the cloud native space. So thank you, Katie and Libby and Christie and everybody at the CNCF. And I'm not going 100% away, but I will no longer be on the meetings. And I do highly recommend you running. Just give it a chance. You never know the people, the places. Everything has just been a really good experience. Yeah, thanks, Laurie. Thank you for all your contributions this year. We're really saddened that you'll be leaving us.  This is just till the next thing that we're working on together, which I'm lucky that I continued to get to work up with you on the Projects Working Group. I know you're going to do great things there. And thank you for all the things that you did this year within the marketing committee. I think everyone can kind of give you a resounding thank you on that as well. We all know that you've worked really hard in this position and we're looking forward to what the future brings for you. So with a heavy heart that brings me on to our nominations are now open for 2024. So if you're well versed in CNCF marketing member programs, if you have a passion for helping others, this role is for you. We have a full description in the link attached here. We recommend that you take the time to look through what this role entails, what the requirements are and kind of the expectation. If you're interested or you know someone else that you think would be interested, feel free to pass on the information on the job description as well as the form to fill out. The end for call for nominations will be October 18th. You'll meet with the CNCF team in late October to early November. We'll do a presentation on the December 6th call. Voting will occur from December 6th through the 11th. Elections will end on December 11th and then we'll make a debut of our new marketing committee chair in January 2024. Great, before we jump into membership growth, I wanna kick it over to George and Lori to give a quick project updates, project update. So we had our first project working group meeting last week, I think, I don't know, time was crazy. Anyway, so we tried to get as many projects involved as possible and we did have a handful of projects attend the meeting. It was a feedback session and I think what we got out of it was extremely positive. There are lots of items that the projects were happy to have as part of their marketing kits but there are many things that they want and I think that this is a great way for us to actually have the one-to-one or one-to-many contact with them to see what those are and move things forward. So we presented Katie's template and that was very, very well received and it kind of brought up a conversation about creating more sort of templates like that and an actual sort of handbook that we could sort of hand out to the projects as they get onboarded. So they have the templates and everything and one easy to find location and we can move forward from there. So it's sort of like taking all the feedback and figuring out what we can do to kind of templateize some things and help people scale up. So George, I don't know if you had anything else you wanted to add? Yeah, I just wanted to add, if you go into the channel, we're working with content providers at KubeCon to connect them to projects and things like that. So if you're looking to kind of connect with content producers, I'd like to get better at connecting projects to podcasts and things that are always looking for content and projects to highlight. So as long as we do that in a classy way, join me in the channel and we will figure that out. And I think too, the one thing that would be really helpful is that if y'all know of a lead maintainer or a project contributor that may have missed the meeting, if you have them join the Slack channel, which is the Projects Working Group Slack channel, then we can have more communication. Like I said, we didn't have a lot of projects represented. There's 172, I think projects right now and we only had a handful show up to the call. So we wanna make sure that we are disseminating the information to as many projects as possible. So Katie put the Slack channel in the meeting chat and again, I highly recommend you ask the project maintainers or contributors that you know to kind of join that channel so we can all sort of stay up to date with each other. In addition, Katie sends out a newsletter to the project. So it'd be great if you could tell them to open it and read it and then they also would get the information that way. So I think we know that there's a lot coming in their direction. So bare minimum open an email, join the Slack channel and we'll be able to further help them move along and like share things like Katie's template and the hopefully the workbook moving forward. Thanks Laurie, thanks George. I think this is a great start to an amazing initiative that is gonna continue to help support our projects and help support the growth within their own ecosystems as well as the overall CNCF ecosystem. Moving on to some project updates. Or onto team updates, I'm gonna kick it over to Libby for membership growth. Okay, hey y'all. Oh, okay. Well, here's a look at our new members joining us Silver and then I'm gonna hand this over to our PR and HR team. So who is with us today? It's Jess. Hi. Hi. Great, yeah. So we had, as you may have seen, it's China, so it's a little less visible but KubeCon, CloudNativeCon opens for a summit in China which happened a week and a half ago. It went really, really well. We actually have a lot more coverage that came out from our English speaking media from the event. It was, we had, we flew in eight different media analysts who were from, well, either English speaking or from English speaking countries. And then we had over 25 Chinese media there. And it was great. We had a new upgrade to Gold with Dow Cloud who's a Chinese based company. And so there's a couple of different articles if you guys end up looking that up. That came out of the event, that was pretty interesting. And the next slide. We also, as you know, work on micro-surveys and one of our, our latest one was around training and certification which was really interesting. This actually also had a lot more coverage that's come out since I updated this, but yeah, some really great coverage just around how training and certification has impacted developers in their careers. So definitely work, I included the link to the actual blog that we wrote the findings and then the coverage is great. And then just a quick highlight on the various project security audits that have been done. You can look at those, those are links to the blog posts about them if you're interested. And I think that's good. Hey, Jesse. The updates, Annie. Yeah, and so I'll, I'll go ahead and cover a bit here about what's new with analyst relations. There's actually some really exciting stuff. One of the things with the CNCF Analyst Relations Program, one of our goals is to drive thought leadership. And so we're consistently in a loop of feeding insights back to the analysts and encouraging them to write their own thoughts and build on their, their, these insights. And we do this through, you know, meeting with them at KubeCon and at the events. We hold round table panels. We hold the analyst event where we'll bring in maintainers or different end users or thought leaders. And we're also sharing with them the news and the case studies and the best practices. Well, the reason I bring that up on this slide is what's exciting about this slide is this is an example of category creation. And I know in marketing that comes up a lot when you're working on, you know, how should I be positioning? Where should we be talking to our messaging for our company? Category is really a key positioning anchor for any of the technology and service offerings. And it shapes the buyer's perception. It gives them some place to put their budget, right? So it does, it's very important. And oftentimes in the world that we're in when it's emerging tech is there's not always an obvious category. So what's interesting about this and what I wanted to call out is this is an example of a new category coming to life. And this is an example of the analyst relations influence that we can have on creating that category. So in this particular case we put a quick screenshot of the analyst, Manjunath Bhatt, who's very active with our program that he posted a few weeks ago, actually just a week ago or so on LinkedIn just talking about this new report and the influence on how that report came to life. You know, for those of you who know category creation it requires clear business value. It requires that the customer and the use cases be there and that there's groundswell and that, you know, you can't have a category of only one. Like Uber was not a category until Lyft and other competitors came into the market, right? So that's just an example. But in this case, he cites CNCF and the new market back to backstage in the influence of their conversations there. We've actually held a lot of maintainer and user panels with that as being part of the topic of conversation. So, you know, we were pleased to see some of this coming together. Another example, if you just go to the next slide and so I do encourage you if you're in that market or you're not, check it out. If you do have to have a Gartner license to be able to access these but you can see the analysts also put a lot of information up on LinkedIn. So it's good to follow the analysts that are in your business market category or even tangential to that. Even if you're not in the report and you fit somewhere in that description, you might wanna be talking to the analysts and informing them and sharing them what your companies do because that's how they start to talk to buyers, right? They're talking to the buyers, they're talking to the end users. Another new report just in the terms of this theme of category creation is this magic quadrant for container management. This is the inaugural magic quadrant. So it was a market guide before and what Gartner does is they usually start with a market guide and then as the category matures and it moves through that hype cycle, it becomes a magic quadrant. So that's a new one, the magic quadrant for container management. And actually there's a whole new one that published from Forrester as well. The Forrester Wave from Multicloud Container Management just published actually on Monday. So we don't have it here in the slides, but you can look for that. That's from Forrester and Lisa Starr is the leading analyst of that. He's always at all the cube cons and he's very excited since Chicago this year because that's his hometown. So we've curated a bit of the highlights of the news. What I will tell you all is there is so much out there now. If you go onto the next slide, it's not just Gartner and Forrester, it's a whole group of analysts and firms out there. So many we don't always capture them all. So we just try to curate some of the highlights. But you can see here, there's some great stuff coming forward. A lot of these are the analysts. All of these are part of the CNCF Analyst Relations Program ecosystem. And if you have any questions about analyst relations or how we're working with the teams out there, please don't hesitate to let us know or what you might wanna see moving forward. Drop us a drop Carl and I aligned for that as well. And I see there's one question. Oh yeah. Has CNCF done research? CNCF bigger, yeah. Sorry, has CNCF done research and documented the typical CNCF user engineers, developers, et cetera, personas? Is there anything you can share? I think that's probably outside, that's not really analyst relations as much as it's probably more of a marketing question. Yeah. So what I can say is, I don't personally know what we've done in terms of research and documented typical CNCF users. I will bring this back to Chrissy and have her share the information that we do have on file, if any. And then if we haven't done it, why, we haven't. So I'll take this question back to Chrissy and she'll follow it. And I saw someone mention the CNCF annual survey which is also another great resource and we do share that out with the community as well, the analysts and the press. Thanks, Trisha. And thank you, Jesse, for your updates. If you have anything regarding KR, we definitely recommend reaching out to our PR team about that. Moving on, I wanna hand this over to Libby and Charlie at this time. Hey, y'all. So September online programs were busy and bustling. Most important to remember is the Q4 dates are open on the calendar. So you can book your programs through the end of 2023 now. We have a few weeks that we do take off due to KubeCon and holidays as everyone's kind of wrapping up. So be sure to take a look at those and get all your programs booked. In total for September, four live streams, still getting tons of views between LinkedIn and YouTube and average peak live viewers look like they've gone up between the two. There were 14 on-demand webinars with almost 10,000 total views. We are missing the last four programs from September because we had to pull data early. So I'm sure we went over the 10,000 mark there. And we had two live webinars with a total of 318 registrations and almost 5,000 views. So keep that content coming. Everyone is viewing it either live or post event. And if you have any questions, just feel free to reach out to me directly and I can help you out. And keep those Kube Weekly articles and posts and tweets and everything coming our way. We continue to publish this weekly. The open rate is going up and we're still continuing to see pretty consistent, pretty consistent open rates and click rates through each week. So, and remember that your online programs are also promoted there the week before and after as well. So it's another great place to promote all of your programs. And now I'll hand it over to Charlie for our end-user case studies. Thank you, thanks Libby. So we had two great end-user case studies published last month, one from HDFC Bank and another from the trip.com group, which coincided with KubeCon in China cause trip.com is a very well-known Chinese brand. I do just want to highlight that if you would like any case studies published before the end of the year, please do let me know ASAP. You can submit your proposal via GitHub. It's very straightforward and simple. I do have a couple of openings coming up in the next few months because a couple of folks have had to sort of push case studies back for various internal reasons. So if you want a case study before the end of the year, please do get in touch ASAP on that. Could you click to the next slide please, Katie? Thank you. And just a quick look at our metrics for this month. Once again, a really great month on the blog. We had the blog highlight, which kind of links back to what Jesse was saying earlier about the importance of certification. So the highest-read blog was the new certification on the Istio Certified Associate. And that was published on the 21st of September and has already got more than 1,500 views. Just a note as well, if you want to have a look at these analytics for yourself, you do provide the link to our trackers. So you can have a look at the blogs and you can also have a look at case studies on that too. And more. So it's like a little announcement because we haven't set the date yet, but we are going to be having our very first ever live humans of cloud native panel discussion at the upcoming KubeCon in North America, which I'm really excited about. We've got three absolutely amazing humans joining us. Bart Farrell is going to be moderating and the whole idea of this panel is to really demystify getting into cloud native, how you can find your way in what is a really fantastic community, but what can sometimes be a fairly intimidating community? I mean, we are absolutely huge. So we're on earth to start. So this is what this panel is going to be all about. And the fact that really it takes all of us to make cloud native technology as successful as they are. So I will update you as soon as possible on the dates and times and location of this panel. And yeah, we'd absolutely love to see you all there if you had the time at KubeCon. Great. Thanks, Libby. Thanks, Charlie. I'm looking forward to that humans of cloud native panel. I think it's going to be a great addition to hearing our community stories live and I'm pretty excited about it. So if you have the time, I definitely encourage you to stop by that. A quick update on community programs. So we're excited to have completed 24 KCDs so far this year where we've gone ahead and surpassed what the number of KCDs we held last year already and we have an additional eight in progress. We've already started planning phases for 2024 and we have about 15 committed KCDs for that for next year. Just a quick update on CFP deadlines. KCD Los Angeles 2024 closes November 1st. Sao Paulo, Brazil 2024 closes November 5th and Oslo, Norway closes November 13th. If you have any folks or if you're local to any of those areas, I do encourage you to submit a CFP. We would love to have you join those community run programs. Additionally, we have a few coming up in the next few weeks. We have KCD UK this month and then KCD Denmark and Ertrich next month in mid-November and end of November beginning of December. And KCD Sao Paulo, Brazil has their prospectus open until January, 2027. So if you're looking for ways to get involved in smaller regional events specific to CNCF, this is a great resource for you to check out. And then check out our CNCGs. We have several coming up this week in various different locations. So if you're local to those areas we recommend you checking them out. They've been super successful this year. We've seen a great comeback of our CNCG groups and meetups have really started to reestablish themselves in the community. So we're excited to see this continue to grow. And with that, we'll move on to events and I'll kick it over to Celia to share those updates. Thanks, Katie. All right, as we've mentioned a couple of times already during this meeting, we wrapped up KubeCon and CloudNativeCon open source summit China last week. We'll have those post-event stats at the next meeting potentially at least the infographic with the demographics before then but the full report by the next meeting. And then next right around the corner we have KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America coming up in November. Sponsorships have closed of course, registration we're in our late registration rate period until the event begins when we'll switch to onsite reg rates on November 6th. Our final room blocks are closing next week and the week after. So be sure to book your hotel rooms. And we have 15 confirmed CNCF hosted co-located events and sponsor hosted colo events which will happen off-site. Those details are on the next slides and of course the schedule is live. So I won't go into full details on all of these but here's just a list of the CNCF hosted colo events that are taking place, the slide and the next one. And the schedule is live. So you can go to the website and look at the colo day schedule as well. And then just a few questions coming in. Can we share where we're at registration rise Celia? And how that's tracking towards our goal. Yep, so we're tracking towards 9,000 registrations total and then our colo day is looking like 2,500 plus. So looking good. Perfect. All right, and the next, oh, sorry. Our sponsor hosted colo events, again, these will happen off-site. They are not included in the KubeCon All Access Pass but you can add these on during your registration. So these are all in the system. And quick update on project opportunities at KubeCon North America. We have 36 total projects that will be participating with a working session and 62 projects that have an in-person kiosk in the showcase. These details are also on the website along with a schedule of when these events are taking place. All right, and then after that we have GitOpsCon Europe. This is taking place December 5th and 6th virtually on the Central European time zone. We do have sponsorships available until November 20th. Registration is open and the CFP closes today. So submit any proposals as soon as you can. All right, also in December we have two KubeDay events taking place, KubeDay India and Singapore. Sponsorship opportunities are still open until November 3rd. Registration is open as well. We have the early bird rate until October 13th next week. And the CFP is now closed. We'll do the schedule announcements next week as well on October 11th. All right, and we're moving into KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2024. The event dates for this are March 19th. We'll be our pre-event programming and CNCF hosted co-located events. And March 20th through the 22nd we have the main event days. Sponsorships are available until December 14th. Registration will be opening this month. And our CNCF hosted co-located events will be announced the week of October 23rd on the website along with the CFP. And sponsors also have the opportunity to purchase the cross promotion practice package for any sponsor hosted colos. The CFP is open and closes November 26th. I think it is. Yeah, November 26th. And also in 2024 we have information available for KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America. This is happening November 12th will be our co-located event day and November 13th through the 15th will be the main event. We're hosting in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sponsorships are available until August 16th and same process for submitting your CNCF project or co-located event proposal and the opportunity for the cross promotion package for sponsor hosted colos. Thanks Celia. We do have a question which I'll address. The KubeCon and NA have generally been larger in attendance than the European ones. Any thoughts on why this seems to have changed? So I think there's a few different factors that play into the change that we're seeing when it comes to KubeCon North America. One of the biggest ones is that we are in an economic recession right now, right? So a lot of companies that typically would send larger amounts of teams to KubeCon North America are definitely tightening those belts, especially later in the year than they were at the beginning of the year. When it comes to budgets, many people tend to spend the money in that first quarter when they know that things are going to change financially within the economy and then tighten at the latter half of the year. So we're kind of seeing that having a slight impact on our numbers for KubeCon North America but we will be at about the same numbers for KubeCon EU 2023. Additionally, the adoption of open source in Europe has really skyrocketed over the last few years, I think through the pandemic and into this year. Prior Europe had kind of trended a little behind North America when it came to that adoption of projects and open source technology and that's not really the case anymore. So we're starting to see a bit of an evening the two programs. I think even when we look at programs like our KCDs, our KCDs tend to be very heavily populated in European countries than the use outside of it. So it's just kind of where the trends are when it comes to the technology and then also kind of the economy impacting things as well. So I think we'll start to see quite a bit pick up again moving into 2024 and 2025 and 2026 as we start to see the forecasting for all these new projects coming in as well as the economic constraints kind of lifting as well. So we have no concerns from our end. That's just those are what we're seeing just based off of things that are happening. Yeah, yes, San Diego was 12,000. So again, comparing what happened in 2019 to where we are right now is really, really hard to do because the economy was so different in 2019 and it's changed a lot over the last four years. And I think that we need to keep that in mind especially when it comes to all of this. And then like I said, as we see adoption in new regions it makes it kind of change where we see the growth within the ecosystem. How much does AWS re-event being a month from KubeCon affect the attendance will KubeCon ever consider moving? So we've always been about a month maybe a little more than a month from AWS re-event. We haven't seen much impact over the years. We are looking as CNCF grows, as our community grows, as we add more projects, we are looking further and further out. As Celia mentioned, we can already share the location for KubeCon North America 2024. This is starting to be a trend for us to kind of start to provide more insight of where those locations are earlier. AWS re-event is always different AWS re-event is always during that same time, same week. So a lot of people already have that planned in their budgets and know about it. And then they know that KubeCon is usually anywhere from six weeks to a month prior to that. So they plan that accordingly. So we don't see much impact when it comes to those two different events. There are several large events in November, Gartner, Synosis, VMware, and more. We'll see animalists team splitting up between thanks Tricia for providing that insight. It's really impactful for re-event K8 folks. Thanks for that insight, Chris. Yes, so today there are dozens more specialized conferences that didn't exist before. And we are seeing that too, right? As we continue to have more area-focused conferences, whether that's SecurityCon or WasmCon, there are some people kind of migrating towards those as well. For most events, there is a spike of registration in the last three weeks before the event. Not sure if this is typical case. Yeah, it is, right? This is typical case. We will see a spike of registrations here over the next couple of weeks. We are a month out from the event. So we're expecting to see quite a bit of a spike these next couple of weeks. It would be really interesting to see the increase decrease in vendor versus end user attendance across NA Europe over the years. So, Henrik, you can see, or maybe it's Henrik, you can see the trends of how our cube cons and everything have grown over the years in our post-event transparency report. Any other questions related to the events that we have coming up, deadlines, anything along those lines? As always, if you have any questions, you can feel free to post them in the Slack channel. We'd be happy to answer them or an events person will jump in and provide some insight as well. A little off topic. Are there any speaker cards or templates we can use to promote our cube cons speakers on social? Yes, there is and your speakers should have received speaker social cards. If they didn't, they can email our speaker alias. I'll grab that and send it to you here in the chat momentarily. Or Celia, if you have that available, the speaker, I think it's CNCF speakers, but I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, yep, I'll put it in. Bravo. Great. Perfect. Any other questions around events? Can someone point me to where KC, CNC, cloud native con graphics projects can use to promote our booth and working session? Yep, so our graphic, the logo is on GitHub, the graphic portion of it should be available on GitHub as well. If not, we can send that over. It wasn't sure on the graphics, okay. Yeah, we'll send that over. I believe that we have a, right, Libby, we have a marketing. Yeah, we've got a marketing toolkit we'll put together for that. So as soon as it's ready, we will send it out via Slack and email. Perfect. All right, article submission as part of the Silver Sponsorship package when will we hear back on final publishing date? I believe that's a question for you, Jesse. I'm not sure I heard that question, what was it? It's R-E, article submission as part of the Silver Packet Sponsorship package when we'll be, oh, when we'll be here back. Oh yeah, okay, so guys, thank you. Yeah, so fine, fine. I'm actually going through the very, very large list and working with our media partners to place them now. So as I get through it, I send an email to the person who submitted it. And then in terms of timing, it's like most people, I'm hoping everybody will have a response from me. I'm hoping by the end of the week, but maybe early into early next week. And then they will be published before KubeCon. I do not get information on when that is, but I will try to flag hopefully when it does publish. But everybody will know where their article will be published at some point before KubeCon. Great, thank you. Any other questions with that? I'm gonna jump into training and certifications. We continue to see growth in our training enrollments. It's been really great to see that over this past year as people are trying to add to their career and the advancements that each of these trainings provide. So we have a few enrollments there that are up moving on to the next slide. Again, CKAS saw growth as well when it came to it. So to CKAS, CKAD saw growth. Same with CKNA or KCNA. And then the same with our PCA. So I'll give you all the time to kind of peruse that on your own. No, what? Gosh. Okay. Thank you. And then key takeaways. So just a key takeaway reminder to register for KubeCon, PlotNativeCon North America. If you haven't done so already, remind your team to get registered if you're a sponsor and you haven't had all your sponsorship passes registered yet. Join us for the architect, your schedule live stream tomorrow to see what other people are putting on their schedule and what sessions you should be looking out for. Register for the onsite happy hour during KubeCon and then nominate yourself or colleague for the 2024 MC chair. So those are kind of the key takeaways for this call and we're looking forward to seeing as many of you as we can next month at KubeCon. And thank you again, Lori, for all your help this year. And we're really looking forward to working with you in the future on other projects. And then lastly, share your wins for 2023. Celebrate the hard work for 2023 that you've done. You can share them big or small. Maybe you hosted an online program. Maybe you had a new tactic in your boot that was successful. Maybe you were part of a KCD or you joined the business value subcommittee. Let us know by December 1st and we'd love to share these out in the December meeting. And thanks everyone. As always, if you have any questions, you can email the marketing alias or you can post them in Slack. Thanks everybody.


I'll be reading from a novel by Nat Hintoff, the day they came to arrest the book. It was challenged in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1990 because it taught young people to challenge and defy authority. You've got to understand first that Karen Salters is no firebrand. The only crusade I ever knew her to get involved in was saving the whales. And since one of her ancestors was captain of a whaling ship out of New Bedford, I put that to guilt. So when more than the usual number of would-be censors began to come around the school a couple of years ago, Baines went on. Karen used to say, there aren't many books I'd go to the stake for. She liked the job. She needed the money. What she didn't need was trouble. Her husband had been sick for a long time before he died, so that took care of whatever they'd saved. What I mean is, Karen wasn't carrying any banners, not for the First Amendment or anything else. What kinds of censors were coming around, Dager asked? The standard brands, parents who didn't want their children reading about sex or being exposed to words they weren't allowed to use at home. No problem there, of course, so long as they wanted to prevent only their own kids from reading those books. You'd just give the kids something else. But some of the parents wanted to save every single child in the school from those books. Then, Nora Baines buttered her English muffin. There were people who said they were complaining only for themselves and their own children, but they'd pull out a list of wicked books that looked exactly like the list we'd seen from other folks, who said they were only acting for themselves. I must say, however, some did come straight out and say they were part of an organization that was determined to clean up the whole school and woe unto anybody who stood in their way. So it is that we have come to know, if not exactly love, concerned citizens, parents for morality in the schools, and so cash, that is not a vegetable, that is save our children from atheist secular humanism. I think I know the answer to what I'm going to ask, Dager, which Gerald said, but which books were they after? All the usual suspects, Nora Baines' signal for more coffee.  And of course, sweet Judy Bloom, with blazing eyes and flaring nostrils, they have come after blubber and forever, and then again, maybe I won't. And are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. Oh my, I think they would excise Judy Bloom if they could get her to hold still, and Kurt Vonnegut too, although I think they would rather skin him alive to see all the creatures from hell popping out. Dager laughed, your review committee must be awfully busy. That, Nora Baines banged her hand on the table, is the problem. We have all the procedures ready to go. The complaint form for the child's service to fill out, the way in which the review committee is to be put together from the school in the town to examine the complaint. And if the book is arrested, how the trial is to be conducted. I don't understand, Dager said, so what's the problem? A sneaky principle is the problem. Mr. Moore prefers to handle these complaints informally. They hardly ever get to the review committee. Mighty Mike meets with the indignant parent or whoever, and then he takes care of the complaint. What do you mean, Dager asked? Let's say it's a library book, Nora Baines said. Not that we haven't had some complaints about classroom books. He handles those the same way. Of course, he hasn't had to deal with me yet. But if it's a library book, Mr. Moore would have a word with Mrs. Salters. She used to imitate his performances on those occasions. Nora Baines squared her shoulders and taking on a deep, buttery voice impersonated Mr. Moore. My dear Mrs. Salters, with all the good literature available, surely we don't need the questionable books, the offensive books on our shelves. This title, for example, a number of parents have dropped by to talk to me about it. Surely this one book is not crucial to the education of our young charges. I am certain, Mrs. Salters, that someone of your broad experience and knowledge will easily be able to substitute or more balanced. Well, why should I be ashamed to say it? A more healthy book. I'm not criticizing you for having ordered this title, not at all. I am merely suggesting that if you will reflect on this matter with me, you will agree that this book will not be missed if it should be retired from the shelves, or if not wholly removed, at least placed on a restricted shelf. Oh my god, Dager Fritchie Gerald said, one of those, the emperor of smooth, my dear.  If mighty Mike were a mortician, he would soon have given a discount than say death, passed away is what he'd say. And so when he kills or locks up a book, it is not censorship. It is simply selecting another book to take its place. And Mrs. Salters, the new librarian, asked she went along with it without saying a word. At first Nora Baines paused to finish her coffee. Karen figured that one title, a few more titles, weren't worth a battle. And she knew there would have been a fight, a mean fight. Karen was no dummy. She knew for all the honey on Mr. Moore's words that she was getting orders. And if she didn't follow those orders, he'd make her life miserable. She'd seen what he'd done to people who crossed him. But after a while, Baines continued, Karen got to where she couldn't stand figuring out what to say to kids who came in for one of those books and who had to be told it was no longer in the library or that it couldn't be touched unless the kid had a note from his parents. So I wasn't surprised when Karen quite agitated told me one day, this is not why I became a librarian to keep books from people soon after she quit. Without a fight, Dager Fitzgerald frowned. There was one Baines said, it was a doozy. But she's going to have to tell you about that. So far as the record shows, Karen left this school on excellent terms with the principal. She has a grand letter of recommendation from the book killer. Sounds like they must have struck some kind of a bargain. Dager Fitzgerald said, but what? Nora Baines laughed. I am sworn to say no more. I've probably said too much already. But I did not want you to think that Karen was a wimp. She came through in the end. She came through beautifully. Dager Fitzgerald put her fingers together and pressed hard. And now it's my turn, I suppose.


Writing in the early 14th century in France, the Jewish poet Bedersi observed that we are distressed about the past, perturbed about the present, and frightened about the future. The truth is we all recognize that there is no end to the things that worry us. We live with both inner pressure, we have a pressure cooker that rules our lives, and societal stresses as well. Among other things that get to us, financial pressures, family tensions, relationship issues, health concerns, we're overloaded with responsibilities in our lives. We struggle with concerns about our status, about our successes and failures. We have spiritual anxieties. How does God see us? We have to deal with the fast and overwhelming pace of modern life. We're anxious about global unrest and terrorism, apprehensive about crime, concerned about climate change and pollution, and we're stressed by the political turmoil in our countries, among many other things. And aside from these and other real issues, our imaginations often work against us. There's a Midrash, a rabbinic teaching to Ecclesiastes, chapter 7, the book of Kohelas, which says one who has been bitten by a snake is frightened by a rope. The toll that unchecked stress and anxiety can have and take on us is serious. The Talmud says in Tractagitan 7DA that worry saps a person's strength. And in the 12th century, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the Rambam who was also a physician, noted in his writings that if emotional stress is maintained for a long period, one will definitely become ill. He writes that constant anxiety damages the body. And he writes that emotional experiences produce distinct changes in the body that can have an effect on the circulation of blood and functioning of one's organs. Non-science has obviously confirmed these observations, and we know that even low-grade anxiety can lead to severe headaches, chest pain, high blood pressure, digestive disorders, fatigue, restlessness, and insomnia. On the other hand, it's important to recognize that a certain amount of stress in our lives is normal. If you're hooked up to a blood pressure monitor or an EKG, you will see peaks and valleys on the monitor, highs and lows, ups and downs on the readout, but to have an all-even flat line is not a good sign. So life is not about getting rid of stress. Stress is part of life and evidence that you're alive. The question for us is not whether our lives will have periods of darkness and anxiety and stress, but the question is how are we to handle these bumps in life when we encounter them? Now, before we proceed with our discussion tonight, it's important that I make something very clear, an important caveat, which is we will not be dealing tonight with situations of clinical depression or mental illness that require professional medical help. That's not on the table. We'll be dealing tonight with normal run-of-the-mill stresses that we all face in life, and how are we to deal with them? The book of Proverbs written by the wisest man who ever lived, King Solomon in chapter 12, verse 25 says, When there is worry in a person's heart, they should suppress it. We sometimes get so caught up with the situation that we lose sight of the reality that there is more to life out there. There are bigger issues for us to think about. What about my relationships with my family? What about my relationship with God? Are those not important issues? There may be serious crisis facing the Jewish people today, like assimilation, anti-Semitism, threats to the security of Israel. My personal worries aren't so overwhelming in comparison. Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Weinrib, also a psychologist, wondered about the biblical prohibition against making idols of graven images and bowing down to them to worship them, and how this might be relevant in our lives today. We don't go around, most of us, I assume, making statues and praying to them. And Rabbi Weinrib suggested that in ancient times, people would focus on a single element in nature to worship. They would turn away from the vastness and complexity of the universe and isolate something that they had constructed or something in nature. And they would believe in it, and only it, and that it only is worthy of their adulation. Worrying can be a disproportionate attention to a single issue because it's only a small part of the totality of existence. Worrying suggests, Rabbi Weinrib, might be a form of idolatry to be consumed by worry narrows one's focus and attention to only one concern. We could be paying more attention to all the blessings that surround us, but no, we choose to focus on something and get overwhelmed by it. And that disproportionate focus by Weinrib says is problematic. So what does it mean when the Talmud suggests that we suppress worry? So suppressing our anxieties is the result of recognizing that number one, there's a bigger world out there because while a teenager might really believe that everyone is staring at their pimple, the truth of the matter is that they will hopefully come to realize that people have their own issues that they're worrying about. And number two, we can suppress our worries when we realize that we're not the only people that have these challenges. And this lessens the intensity of these challenges. Now there are other ways as well of suppressing our worries. Number one is distraction. There is an old Yiddish proverb, if you want to forget all your troubles, put on a shoe that's too tight. Now this kind of distraction requires a certain amount of out of the box thinking. There's a story I once heard about a person who was consumed with fear and was not able to sleep at night. He was terrified that there were monsters hiding under his bed. And he was going to a psychiatrist for years and years and years and the psychiatrist was not able to alleviate him of these fears and he was not able to sleep. And one day this fellow runs into his rabbi, he hasn't seen in many years, and the rabbi asks him how he's doing and he says, you know what, rabbi, not so well, I'm having this terrible problem and my doctor that I'm seeing, he's not been able to help me. And so the rabbi asks him, what's troubling you? And the fellow shares his fear that there are horrible monsters hiding under his bed and he can't fall asleep at night.  And I bump into my rabbi and after a 10 minute discussion, I'm all better. And the doctor is flabbergasted and says, what did the rabbi tell you? He says, the rabbi told me I should saw the legs off my bed. Now Libyan Jews tell a similar story, that there was once a wicked king who made war against the Jews and in the heat of the battle, some dirt entered into his eye. He withdrew to his palace and he began rubbing his sore eye, but the pain only increased and numerous doctors came in to try to help the king and to try to treat him, but they all failed to do so and they were put to death and the king continually worried about his eye and he kept on rubbing it and unfortunately this only made it worse. One day a Jewish peasant came to the palace and promised that he could heal the king's eye. He told the king to undress and after rubbing his stomach, he announced that he could feel a tapeworm that was eating the king's stomach and growing bigger every day. He told the king that the tapeworm was a much bigger problem than his eye and he gave him a bottle of medicine and told the king to rub this medicine on his stomach every day of the week and on the eighth day the peasant promised that the tapeworm would die and he would feel much better and the king indeed became very worried about this tapeworm and he forgot about his eye and he stopped rubbing it. His eye of course quickly improved and of course the imaginary tapeworm soon disappeared as well. The king was extremely grateful. He rewarded the peasant and allowed the Jews to live peacefully in his land forever after. So the simplest way to suppress anxiety by distraction is by directing our mind to focus on something that's positive. The simple truth is that we are only able to think about one thing at a time. Our mind is only able to entertain one thought at a time. You can't think about two things at the same time simultaneously. So if we're getting stressed about something and feeling very anxious, we can make the decision to instead think about something that's positive. There are very simple and effective strategies like this that are explored in the fascinating book called The Marshmallow Test, Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It by Walter Michele that there are very simple ways of distracting our mind and focusing on things that are positive and we're simply not able to be preoccupied with negative self-destructive thoughts. Now our verse that we learned in Proverbs advised that we mitigate the negative impact of worry by suppressing it. However, the Talmud suggests that there is an alternative way of translating that verse. Again the verse says, and the Talmud says you can translate the word not to suppress but to discuss, to articulate. And so the truth is we're being advised here by King Solomon that if there's worry in the heart of a person, share your worries.  Discussing them can also help you gain insight and develop productive ways of dealing with your anxieties. And this is not only discussing them with a spouse, with a good friend or a spiritual advisor. We should share our worries with God as well. This is very effective. King David advised us in Psalm 55 verse 23, cast your burden upon Hashem and he will support you. There was a study recently of 246 people about to undergo cardiac surgery. Those who prayed before the operation were less anxious and were more optimistic about the outcomes of their surgery. Now there's an old saying that worry is the interest we pay on troubles before they are due. In light of this, one of the most effective ways of dealing with stress is based upon a teaching of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Lakutei Maran Torah number 272. He writes the following, an important rule in the service of God is that one should only focus on today. When a person seeks to serve God, it seems like an extremely heavy burden. How can I possibly bear such a heavy load? However, when a person considers that he only has that day to deal with, he'll find that it isn't a great burden at all. The truth is that it's very easy to get stressed out when we are all trying to do the things that we're supposed to do as Jews. Let's just take one example. As Jews were supposed to study Torah, a person can get freaked out thinking about how much Torah there is to study. And rather than getting paralyzed by thinking about the entire Tanakh with its commentaries, the Hebrew Scriptures and the 63 tractates of the Talmud and the Midrashim and the codes of Jewish law and all of Jewish philosophy and Jewish history can be overwhelming. Rabbi Nachman says, no, just think about your learning schedule for today. Today, I'm going to study a chapter of the Mishnah. That's not too difficult and I can handle it. One of the things that our inner adversary does to sabotage us is to remind us of all our past spiritual failures or exaggerate how arduous our goals will be to complete. And that can overwhelm us. These thoughts come to rob us of our resolve to seeking and serving Hashem at the present moment. So the way to combat these intrusive thoughts is to ignore the past and the future and to focus only on the present moment. Rabbi Moses Maimonides wrote that contemplation can reduce negative thoughts. It can reduce anxiety and distress. He says that most of these debilitating thoughts come from one of two things. Either we think about painful times of the past, like the loss of money or the loss of a close friend or relative, or it comes from thinking about something that may occur in the future, like a possible loss or injury and fears that they might be coming. Yet Maimonides writes that it is known through rational observation that thinking about the past is of no benefit at all. Sorrow and grief over the past are activities of those who lack the influence of their intellect. There is no difference between a person who grieves over lost money and the like and someone who grieves because he's a human being and not an angel. Similarly, Ram Bam writes, any anxiety that results from thoughts about what may happen in the future are also pointless. Because maybe it will happen and maybe it will not happen. And the truth is that the opposite of what a person fears may actually happen. There's a famous medieval quatrain, the past is no more, the future is yet to be, the present moment is like the blink of an eye, so why worry? One of the most effective ways of overcoming depression is to change the way we think. The Holy Baal Shem Tov pointed out that rearranging the letters of the Hebrew word Mahshava, which is thought, results in the word Besimcha with happiness, that we're able to arrive at states of happiness and fulfillment by the way we direct our thinking. King David's son of Shalom rebelled against him, forcing him to flee. And David ascended the Mount of Olives, we're told in 2 Samuel chapter 15 verse 30, weeping as he went according to the Bible. However, David concluded that he was fortunate that the man who rebelled against him was his son because someone else would have killed him. And so ultimately King David rejoiced in song as we see in Psalm chapter 3, which says a Psalm of David when he fled from Afshalom his son. There's a famous story of someone who came to the market of Meserich because he was puzzled by how the Talmud could teach that we have to be appreciative in life of not just the good things, but we have to also be appreciative for the unfortunate negative things that happen to us in life. And this person said, I can't understand that. How is it possible for a person to appreciate both the good that happens and the negative that happens? Doesn't make sense. And so the Mognitive Meserich said, look, for that question, I can't answer it. You have to go to Ravzusha of Anipol. He's the one that can answer your question. So this person travels all the way to Anipoli and he asks the people in the town, where is the house of Ravzusha? And they direct him to the outskirts of the town and he gets to what looks like a very depressing little street. And he sees where he's directed this hovel, this terrible looking place. It's in shambles. You can't believe anyone even lives there. He knocks on the door and he says, is this the home of Ravzusha? And the person answering the door says, yeah, that's me. And he looks at this person.  It's a broken down little hut. There's nothing in it. He's dressed in tatters. And he said, look, the Mognitive Meserich sent me to you because he said, you can explain how it is that the Talmud tells us that we have to be thankful, not just for the good things in life, but for the negative things in life as well. And Ravzusha looked at this person and says, I can't understand why in the world the Magid sent you to speak to me? Because truthfully, nothing negative ever happened to me in my entire life. My life is just one huge blessing. Ravzusha lived in a state of constant contentment. Regardless of his circumstances, he was able to be happy. There's a story told that on a hot day, the Rebbe and the Yeshiva needed some air. So he interrupted his studies, opened the door of the Yeshiva, and walked into the village street where he was surrounded by several of his devoted students. Across the street, the Rebbe and his students noticed Yuckel, the water carrier. As usual, Yuckel had a very heavy pole that was draped across his shoulders, two huge pales of water, hung down from the pole, and as Yuckel walked through the village street, the water in the pale slushed from side to side. Yuckel was complaining, not so softly either, as he made his way through the town. Say, Yuckel, my friend, the Rebbe hollered from the cross the street. How are you today? Oy, Rebbe, not so good. My shoulders, they ache from carrying this water year after year. I can't even count the years I've been schlepping water. And my children? You shouldn't know from it. Not one of them wants to go into the family business. They're all too busy studying Torah and the holy books. They have no time to help me. And my wife? Oy, she nudges me to do this and to do that. As soon as I get home, she's after me to do one thing or another. Oy, Rebbe, not so good, not so good. Blessings to you, my brother. Blessings to you, the Rebbe shouted after him. And the Rebbe's students intoned the same phrase. Blessings to you, blessings to you. Time passed perhaps a few weeks, and once more the Rebbe opened the door to the Yeshiva so that he and his devoted students could take in some fresh air. And what do you know? But who was across the street? Just as that moment, yockel the water carrier. Shalom aleichem, yockel. May peace be with you. How are you today? Asked the Rebbe. You know, Rebbe, not so bad. Not so bad. You know, my shoulders, they serve me well and continue to do so. They're strong. And as a result, I can bring water to all the people of our village. And my children, the Holy One, blessed be He, has blessed them all with bright and inquisitive minds. They're bringing me such nacha, such pride and joy from their studies. Their knowledge fuels my soul. And my dear wife of so many years, if not for her asking me to do things around our house, I wouldn't know how much she needed me. She does need me. And I need her. Rebbe, I am so blessed. My life is blessed. And thank you for asking. Borach Hashem, praise to God. The students gathered around the Rebbe, rushing to ask Him if this was the same yockel. The one who just weeks before had been so miserable. Yes, this is yockel the water carrier, said the Rebbe. Only this time, He comes to see His service, His burdens as a blessing. Everything in life can be reframed and understood in a positive light. One more story. There was once a man named Shlomo. Everyone in town knew Shlomo by the beautiful, beautiful coat that he had made. He wore the coat everywhere. He wore it in his house. He wore it when he was walking along on the road. When he went shopping, when he went to work, everywhere he went, he wore his beautiful coat. He just loved it. Then one day he noticed that the sleeves were starting to fray and the ends were getting really, really ratty. The coat looked horrible. At first, Shlomo didn't know what to do. He loved his coat so very much, he couldn't imagine getting rid of it. But fortunately, Shlomo was a tailor and he had a great idea.  Now it was a little bit shorter than the coat certainly, but it was so lovely. And just as he'd worn the coat everywhere, he now wore his jacket everywhere. When he went shopping, when he went to work, but as it happened before, over time, the jacket started to get horribly, horribly worn. Now the sleeves had horrible tears and Shlomo knew that there was nothing he could do to fix them. There were also holes at the bottom of the jacket. Once again, at first, he didn't know what to do. Fortunately Shlomo remembered what he had done the last time.  He loved the vest and just as he had worn the coat everywhere and just as he had worn the jacket everywhere, he wore the vest everywhere as well. People seeing him walking down the street would recognize him immediately. It could only be Shlomo wearing that beautiful vest, but again, as it happened before, over time, the garment began to fray and wear out. Shlomo had spilled some food on it and he couldn't get it cleaned. It was a disaster.  He made the most wonderful tie. And like the other beautiful things that he had made before, he wore this tie everywhere. He loved the tie so much that he even wore it to sleep. But again, over time, the tie too started to fall apart. This time Shlomo truly didn't know what to do. Already, he made a coat into a jacket and a jacket into a vest and a vest into a tie. And he looked around his workshop and he took out his scissors and he began to cut and stitch and he snipped and he sewed and he used the fabric from the old tie to make a button. Next he took the button and sewed it onto a brand new coat. Right where he would always be able to look at it. To Shlomo it would serve as a constant reminder of his wonderful coat, jacket, vest and tie. After that, every time someone saw Shlomo walking down the street, he or she too would be reminded of something. You can always take something out of nothing. You can always make something out of nothing. And what is unsightly to one person may be another person's treasure. Now there are several things that we can do to help establish a strong foundation for our lives that will help us maintain our equilibrium in the face of stresses and anxieties. One is the critical importance of self-esteem. We are a coin of Lublin, the famous Hasidic master taught that not only do we have to believe in God, but we must believe in ourselves as well. We were created in the image of God. We have a divine soul with infinite spiritual worth. And that should help each of us to feel that we are something important. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin chapter 4, Mishnah 5 says the following. Therefore, a single person was created in the world to teach that if you cause a single soul to perish, it's to God as if you cause the entire world to perish.  For a man stamps many coins with one seal, and they all look alike. But the king of kings, the holy one blessed be he, has stamped every man with the seal of the first person, yet none of them is like their fellow. Before the Talmud teaches, each person is obligated to say, for my sake, the world was created. This perspective can help us realize that our life is larger than our pimple. Our life is larger than our failures or our fears. And this kind of healthy self-esteem can get us through tremendous bouts of anxiety, stress, and depression. Another part of a strong foundation in life, an establishing one that can help us stand up in the face of challenges, was explained by Rabbi Dr. Akiba Tatz. Rabbi Tatz wrote the following. Find your path of self-actualization, what you should be doing in life. When our soul feels that it is moving productively in life, stresses become less stressful. Rabbi Shem Shun Rafaal Hirsch noted that the Hebrew word for growth, samayach, is similar to the word for happiness, samayach. And that's because we are most fulfilled and most happy when we are growing as people, when we're growing intellectually, when we're growing emotionally, when we're growing spiritually, when we're growing in our relationships with other people and with God, when we're growing in our character traits, when we're growing we are happy. That growth itself produces happiness and fulfillment and contentment. And it's that foundation of contentment and happiness that is able to stand us up in the face of the challenges and stresses and anxieties and worries of life. We know that in the beginning of creation, God put us in God-aidan, God put the human beings in God-aidan.  That's what we were put in because that's what we're supposed to do, we're supposed to grow. And the word aidan means delight or pleasure. Because ultimately the greatest pleasure, the greatest delight is growing. And when this is the big picture of our lives, when we're growing and we're focused on growing, worries and stresses don't easily wear us down. Rabbi Tatz writes the following, while the energy of creativity is flowing, depression and despair are impossible. The spiritual root of depression is lack of growth in the personality. When time ticks away and nothing new is being built, when all is static, the soul feels the cold hand of death. The cure for depression is activity, at first any purposeful activity. Leading as soon as possible to activity of the soul. Rev Cook, the first chief rabbi of the modern state of Israel, writes in his Orotah Chuvah, the Lights of Repentance, that Chuvah repentance, or returning really, returning to who we could be, that Chuvah is the life impulse of growth and self-actualization. That's what Chuvah is. Chuvah is not simply repenting of our sins. Chuvah is embracing a life of growth and self-actualization. And while optimally he says that this is spiritual, he writes that any positive change is a good place to start. Clean your garage. That's growth. That's improvement. Lose weight. Begin an exercise program. Get busy. Get working.  And it's that static and that inertia that depresses us. The Talmud says in the Dharim, 49b, great is work in that it dignifies its owner. In Psalm 128 verse 2, it says, if you will eat the fruit of your hands, praised are you and good will be yours. And finally for tonight, a third way of building a solid personal foundation that can stand us up in the face of stress is to cultivate bitachon. Bitachon is not Hebrew for bitcoin. Bitachon refers to having trust in God. Stresses often flow from an assumption that we are the author of our own successes and failures. We come to believe that it all depends on me, my decisions, my talents, my actions. The truth is that we are not in total control of everything that happens in our lives. Our choices do make a difference. But we don't run the show. We don't determine what ultimately happens in life. If we assume that everything that happens is under our control, we will have a lot to worry about.  According to Rabbeno Bachaya and others, bitachon is the realization that God is in total control of everything and that nothing happens by chance. And the more we focus on this truth, the more peace of mind we will have in life. Not only does God control everything, God loves us and God wants the best for us. We need to try in life, we need to exercise initiative. But the results are determined by God. Again as it says in Psalm 55, cast your burden upon Hashem. He will sustain you. There's a young man who grew up here in Toronto who is today doing cutting-edge research in the interface between psychology and spirituality. And he says that his work in this area grew out of an experience during his sophomore year at college. He says he was feeling very anxious about academic stresses and had very, very difficult times falling asleep at night. So he spoke with a rabbi, who we study Torah with each week, if he should see a psychologist. Instead, the rabbi handed him a book called Chovot Halavovos, duties of the mind, sometimes translated duties of the heart, an 11th century classic in Jewish spirituality. And the rabbi said to David Rosmarin, today Dr. David Rosmarin, read this for 10 to 15 minutes each night. Rosmarin took the rabbi's advice. Six weeks later, he was feeling a lot better and was able to sleep. And the chapter that the rabbi asked him to study was the chapter on pithachom, the chapter on cultivating trust in God. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov famously wrote, kol ha'ulam kulo geshar tsarmiyod. The entire world is a very narrow bridge. The main thing is not to be afraid. We know that Rabbi Akiva was one of our greatest sages. And one day the Talmud says in Tractate Brachot 6db, he went to try to stay over in a town in a village, and he was refused lodging in the village. He had to go sleep in the forest, and he had with him a candle, a rooster, and a donkey. Unfortunately, everything went wrong. But each time something went wrong, he would say, everything that God does is for the best. When he got thrown out of the village, everything God does is for the best. When the wind blew out his candle and he couldn't see anymore, everything God does is for the best. When his rooster was eaten by an animal, everything God does is for the best. When his donkey ran away, everything God does is for the best. He woke up in the morning and he discovered that that town that he wanted to stay in was ransacked by these horrible army of people that either killed everyone or took them prisoner. And he recognized that had he been sleeping there that night, that would have been his fate. And if his candle was lit all night long, they would have seen him and captured him where he was sleeping in the forest. If his rooster was with him, it would have made noises and that would have alerted the people, the soldiers, to come and get him as well. And the same as if his donkey had been braying. Rabbi Kiva understood that God runs the world and that God has his best interests in mind. And Dr. Abraham Twersky explained that he learned about Bitachon from a young woman who was in a recovery program from alcoholism and drug addiction. And this woman shared with him the following. She said, Rabbi, I am a fanatic, a rabid fan of the New York Jets, the football team. And I will never miss a game. One weekend I had to be away and I asked a friend of mine to record the game for me on her VCR. When I returned, she gave me the tape and said, by the way, the Jets won. And this woman told Dr. Twersky, I began watching the game. And I was horrified by the terrible performance of the Jets. They were playing terribly. By half time, they were 20 points behind. Under other circumstances, I would have been a nervous wreck, anxious and hitting the refrigerator for sweets to settle my nerves. But this time I was perfectly calm because I knew they were going to win. When I entered the recovery program, I made a conscious decision to turn my life over to the will of God. I know that eventually it will all turn out all right because God is in charge of my life. Sometimes I'm 20 points behind at half time. But I don't panic because I know that I am ultimately going to win.


I'm actually surprised at people who will argue Messina not being a Hall of Famer. I think he was an easy choice for me. You see the five-time All Stars of Seven Gold Gloves, we didn't even get into those. But it's interesting to me that you were a guy who was crouched behind the plate, and on those nights you didn't believe that you were catching a guy who might end up in Cooperstown. No, because I felt like some of his stuff on certain nights wasn't overwhelming and dominant. It was the total package that made him a winner. The guy who was able to read swings and was able to think along with hitters and outsmart them brought his pitching brilliance to another level. But when you faced him, you didn't feel like you were facing Roger Clemens where Pedro Martinez. You could be embarrassed four times when you faced him. Mike Messina got you out and I had terrible numbers against him. I think a 190 batting average. But I felt like I had a chance against Mike Messina. So that's why he didn't feel like an overwhelming Hall of Famer to me.


Hey everyone, today we're going to be talking about the Nintendo Switch and the Wii U, specifically why the Wii U failed and how Nintendo has learned from the mistakes of the Wii U to make the Switch so far a resounding success and to make the Switch better set up for future success post launch. Now to understand this we have to admit that the Wii U first was a failure. It really was. It failed, it flopped in so many different avenues that it's interesting to see that some people don't grasp why the Wii U was a failure. And I say this because the whole reason I'm talking about this topic is because a guy named Alex from our Facebook page, and I'll put a link down in the description below to our Facebook page, got a little perturbed on a little news post that we put up about Nintendo spent more money on advertising in March than anyone else in the game industry and essentially it just means that Nintendo spent a ton of money on advertising for the Nintendo Switch during its launch month. And Alex responded to that by saying I don't see why people who buy Nintendo are pretty loyal and they already know what kind of experience to expect so they will always buy Nintendo. They just got to say what makes the system different from the last one and they could do it on Facebook plus with all the people who think they need to make YouTube channels and everything out there they got their free advertisement right there. Oh Alex, it didn't stop there but just to address a couple points that he brings up. Putting a post on Facebook is not necessarily a great way to advertise, yes they have a few million followers on Facebook. In fact they've almost sold as many Switch units already as they have Facebook followers and Facebook's organic reach as someone who I don't know if I call myself a Facebook expert but I did build up a page from nothing to 840,000 likes and Nintendo Prime in a few short months from nothing to 55,000 likes.  So a post on Facebook isn't really, I mean it should be done but it's not, you shouldn't just stop there that's not going to make your system sell. In fact in that case why even do Nintendo Directs at all, why even have a YouTube channel and then about all the YouTube channels willing to advertise everything for free. Nintendo has massive restrictions on YouTube channels including our own. The reason, you know in this video right here you're seeing footage of Puyo Puyo Tetris or Puyo Puyo, yeah Puyo Puyo Tetris and that game is made by Sega. It does not get claimed on YouTube. It's a fantastic little game, I'm playing it on Nintendo Switch. I have a link down in the description if you would like to purchase the game. I really suggest you do, it's a lot of fun but the idea here is that if I used Breath of the Wild footage I would have to wait four days for my video to be approved by Nintendo to put ads on it. Otherwise Nintendo's either going to put ads on it themselves and take all the money from it or Nintendo would block my video and the thing is when I go to get approved if they don't like what I'm saying in the video, Nintendo can deny me anyways. So there's a lot of political play here with Nintendo compared to other companies. So again YouTube channels do it everything for free isn't necessarily true. You do have channels like GameXplain that do have partners that try to block Nintendo from being able to affect their channel but again if Nintendo really really wanted to they could do a full strike against GameXplain and that would affect the entire network. It hasn't happened yet, I don't see Nintendo doing that but Nintendo has the power.  But someone responded you know that because the company wants to attract new customers that's why bad advertisement is one of the reasons why the Wii U failed.  The Wii U has the biggest library of games available over any console. It has CFW whatever that means on both sides and old countless home root apps and emulators. People are lazy nowadays that's all there is to it as for attracting new people those are the ones that make the experience not fun at all because everyone seems to feel they have this sense of entitlement and complain about every last thing like complaining like a five year old girl is suddenly cool.  Because I have to say a few more things you know like he's about to turn 30 so you know he's been gaming a while has a daughter yeah yeah yeah yeah but in general it's interesting seeing this viewpoint still in today's world about why the Wii U failed essentially the Wii U failed these blaming consumers for why the Wii U failed and not Nintendo see the Wii U failed because Nintendo created a system that even they themselves didn't want to take advantage of let me explain so Nintendo released a system with that was heavily built on this idea of asymmetric gaming right they put have one person with the game pad everyone else with different controllers the person with the game pad can do different things and affect the other people with the controllers. In Nintendo Land you had the Chase Me that was an example of asymmetric play in I think it was a new Super Mario Brothers for Wii U new Super Mario Brothers U as it was officially called the person with the game pad could add little platforms which you don't really need but anyways he could it was a way to affect the world the reality is that probably the best use of it would have been like a Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing where a Dungeon Master has the game pad and can control various elements of the game that kind of game never came out to exist other ways the game powers obviously used for things like inventory management but you know as I played Breath of the Wild I started realizing that the inventory management in Breath of the Wild really isn't any less intuitive than the game pad if I have to take my eyes off the screen to manage my inventory anyways what's the difference to hit in a pause menu and then selecting what I want and then going back into the game there's not really a whole lot of difference and Nintendo kind of realized that over time and most of their games do not take advantage of any of the unique features of the game pad and the ones that do say Splatoon which I think it had a really cool feature about tapping the screen to do your Super Jumps well now that we've seen Splatoon 2 out in the wild and we've had beta testing for it with their servers online we see that how they replaced it works almost just as well as it did tapping the screen so there really isn't any functionality that the screen added that really seemed to improve games the exception to this is oddly enough not a Nintendo game ZombieU by Ubisoft actually made the game pad make sense and added suspense and horror to the game that would not be there otherwise and when they ported the game to other systems that's why the Wii U version is still the superior version because it was not the same over like overlays on the screen is not the same as what the game was originally built for so again one game did it really really well and it's a game Nintendo didn't even make so Nintendo had this idea with the Wii U game pad that they themselves never really fulfilled right that that's kind of the core concept here is that the whole concept of the Wii U did not connect with Nintendo's own developers so that's that's problem number one problem number two is that Nintendo chose a terrible name if you look at the logo of the Wii U it literally just looks like an add-on it does and then you combine that with all their advertising all their advertising has the console in the background you have the giant screen in the foreground so what happens is people see that they see the the little console in the back and they think oh Wii U that little console in the back is just a new modified Wii it's just you know just like the Wii mini and the thing in the front is the add-on that's the Wii U that's your $300 add-on and that didn't look enticing the game pad itself the screen was capacitive and really crappy it was it was very very low quality I know that I enjoyed my time with the Wii U so I'm not sitting here to bash Wii but I'm explaining why I failed so the screen was really low quality they added a TV button onto the physical controller but their Nintendo TV app never really was that good so they weren't even fully dedicated to that they didn't deliver in a way that I think people thought they should with the innovations they released a console that yes it wasn't all about the graphics wasn't all about the power it was the Nintendo's first HD console and had a lot of fantastic games no Mario Kart 8 you know again there's a reason they re-released it because it was a fantastic game in the first place so they failed in a lot of avenues with the Wii U and to say that it's because consumers are too lazy to understand the capabilities of the hardware and software Nintendo was too lazy then to understand the capabilities of their own hardware because they failed to do anything fun and unique with the hardware that struck a chord with gamers they failed to tell people or explain to people with a game that this game pad is needed that this game pad excels at what it's meant to do that the game pad is essential it's a new evolution Nintendo didn't do anything to enforce that which is why a lot of people prefer just playing the game with a pro controller now in many ways the Wii U's failures are the Nintendo Switch's successes so the switch might not have like you know the greatest console name of all time but it has a console name that makes sense when you hear a Nintendo switch you don't think about a Wii U even though it's got motion controls you don't think about a Wii U you think about a brand new product you think oh why is it called switch because it switches from handheld to TV that makes sense the Wii U's prospect didn't make sense at a consumer level one of the greatest features of the Wii U is was probably off TV play and your tether to your console you're using a low quality screen that washes off the colors your controller looks like a kid's toy I mean now the switch is out if you look back on that Wii U game pad it looks like a Fisher price toy it was just not very appealing so again these are not issues with consumers this is issues with the Wii U's design marketing name and Nintendo's failure to prove the concept of the Wii U anyways so the switch has an understandable name the switch has an appealing design it looks like a high quality tablet when you Nintendo released the tablet screen for Wii U it instantly looked like something that was 10 years old and the new screen despite being 720p and being a plastic screen instead of gorilla glass in terms of the covering of the LCD is still a pretty high quality screen people touch it they feel it it looks good it looks like today's technology the innovation of removing the Joy-Cons and sliding them back on makes sense there's nothing confusing about it and it makes sense in terms of how you would play like oh you're you plop it down and you want to play two polio Mario Kart you slide off the controls you turn them sideways and because of the Wii era we now know that sideways you do motion control driving and it just works so everything about the switch makes sense and Nintendo has been already taken advantage of it because the main idea here is the main idea of the switch isn't even removing the two can two joy cons and everything the main idea is that you could play the system on go on the go and on the TV it's a very easy to understand concept you don't need a game tailored for switch to understand that as an example breath of the wild the number one selling game on Nintendo switch is a traditional console game originally built for Wii U however it's mass appeal on the switch is extremely obvious because it plays to what the switch is most capable of doing and that's providing a triple a gaming experience on your TV and on the go and that's something that is easily conveyed by just playing games the Wii U you play it it almost feels like you're fighting against the system to get your full enjoyment out of it and that sucks it really does so again the Wii U failed for a copious amount of reasons probably even more than I already stated but the switch is instantly appealing to give you an idea I used to bring my Wii U into an elementary school that I work at and the kids will play it they thought it was cool the thoughts will tune in Mario Kart like I think those games are fun but they also thought it was clunky and I never heard any of those kids when they were done saying yeah that was fun but I now I want one I'm gonna tell my parents I want a Wii U I brought in my switch now every single day since launch to work at this elementary school and the kids can't get enough of it they've been asking their parents through the switch they want to switch switch is cool it's seen as hip it makes sense to them it's appealing to them not just the games the system itself is appealing and that's what the Wii U struggled with as you can have all the fantastic games you want in the world it could add a breath of wild at launch as an example but Wii U itself was unappealing and that's where the switch is succeeding that's why you're seeing the sales you're seeing I know people like oh it's just because of Zelda no people who bought the switch for Zelda admit they liked the switch itself how many you know over half of the consumers if not 80% of the consumers by now who bought a switch also bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe see it's not just a Zelda system when games come out they're continuing to buy them okay I mean from in March alone there was over 5 million pieces of software sold that means that everyone who bought a switch also bought one other game besides Zelda that's insane so if you just look at the grand scope the Wii U failed because it was an idea that Nintendo didn't really believe in and the switch is succeeding because it's an idea Nintendo does believe in and it's an idea that learned off the marketing the Wii U the Nintendo switch is what the Wii U really should have been in the first place but it wasn't now we have a product that even isn't even complete we don't even have the online systems for and people still enjoy it they're still taking it with them on planes while hooking it up to their TV while taking it on trains and buses and as an example when I'm at work we don't hook up to a TV at work so we actually use tabletop mode a lot and it's surprisingly useful we were playing four-player Mario Kart 8 Deluxe yesterday on a table on that dinky screen and also was oh that wouldn't be comfortable and we're just fine it really wasn't that bad so Nintendo's on to something with the switch something that they weren't on to with the Wii U and reality is the switch is extremely easy to understand makes sense and looks appealing and they're gonna spend a lot of marketing for it because they realized ever since they unveiled this thing back in October that there is a huge market of people that are being like man this looks good and sorry it's not just Nintendo faithful Alex and other people who believe this that by Nintendo systems a lot of people that they're attracting with the switch right now are people that did not buy a Wii U did not even buy a Wii they are attracting adults that are lapsed video gamers that want a system that's more convenient to their lifestyle and the switch provides you that at home and on the go experience in such a seamless way that there's no compromises at least it doesn't feel like there's any compromises I mean yeah 1080p to 720p but on that small screen you don't notice much of a difference anyways this is Nathaniel of jazz from the center prime signing out