Hello, good morning, welcome back to another vlog. So I did a Q and A video last week. I had multiple questions that were asking me about how I get content and like as a hairstylist, you know, how do I get content of my clients? How do I come up with ideas for content and what equipment do I use and that kind of stuff. And I was gonna do like a separate sit-down video and share all that, but I was like, you know, it would probably be more interesting and more helpful for me to actually just show you rather than tell you. But today's kind of a perfect day for content because I don't have to go to the salon until noon. So if it was in plenty of time in the morning to take my time getting ready so that I can record content as I go. Cause obviously if it's a day where I am pressed for time, I can't be bothered like setting up the camera and moving it around and getting all these artsy shots and whatnot. So when I'm getting content for my YouTube channel, I do use an actual camera. You can see yourself right there. And I always have everything that I use is always linked in the description of every video. So this particular camera, it's a Canon EOS something. When I'm vlogging, I just use the standard lens that comes with the camera for sit-down videos. Sometimes I'll swap it out for a nicer lens so that it looks crisper. And the background is like a little more blurred, but I'll share that later because I am going to be recording a sit-down YouTube video possibly later today. We'll see and I'll show you my setup for that when the time comes. But as far as getting my content for Instagram and or TikTok, I get all of that kind of content with my phone. I just use the back camera on my phone. I think this is like a 12 max pro. It's not the newest model by any means. This tripod is from Amazon. I have quite a few different tripods. This one's nice because you can put your phone or a camera on it. I have one that is just a phone tripod, which I keep in my car. And that's the one that I'll bring to the salon with me. I like to have this one at home because I can, depending on what I'm doing, I can put my camera on it, I can put my phone on it. And I have the versatility. But yeah, I will link this specific one down below because it can get very compact. So you can even use it as like a selfie stick type situation or you can put it on like your countertop. So yeah, I was just recording some like morning routine, get ready with me clips. I think I'm gonna do like a get ready to go to the salon with me video. I like getting those little B roll clips. Like I took a clip of me opening up the curtains and me walking into the bathroom and then brushing my teeth. And once I have all of the clips for that get ready with me video, you know, I'll put those together, I'll make my reel out of that. But then I'll keep all of the raw footage of those individual clips because then I can reuse that in some other way. So it's really good. I have found the best way to be able to get as much content as possible and consistently have stuff to post on a regular basis is just get as much B roll footage as you can. So even if it's just a clip of you like spring perfume on yourself or like curling your hair or something like that, you can then use that kind of footage, throw some music over top of it, throw some text, you know what I mean? Like if you ever scroll through and you see those reels where it's like it's just some random clip but there's like engaging text over top of it. It's like it doesn't really matter what the video is of necessarily. You just need to use something as kind of like your background template. For example, this is one of my best performing reels on Instagram. I just recorded a clip of me washing my face and just use that as like my background footage through some text over top and some music and boom, easy. And then what's nice is like as I'm scrolling through my Instagram feed, if I see something that inspires me and gives me an idea, like, oh, that's a really cool prompt for a reel or that's a cool audio or whatever, I already have all this video footage to choose from so I don't have to be like, crap, now I have to get up, get ready so that I can film a clip for this video. I already have all this footage that I can choose from saved on my phone. And like you can reuse stuff. No one is gonna notice. No one's gonna care. I mean, obviously you don't wanna just like keep reposting the same exact thing over and over and over but like you can use the same like stock footage and just change the music, change the text, stuff like that. Cause if I had to be like recording fresh video footage every single time I was posting an Instagram reel, I would only be posting like maybe once a week, you know? But I try to post almost every day or like as often as many times throughout the week as I can. But now what I'm gonna do is get a clip of me walking into my closet and looking for an outfit to wear. So I'm gonna set up my phone, make sure I'm recording with the back camera. You can use the front camera, sometimes I'll do that if I really need to see what I'm recording but the back camera is always going to be higher quality. Okay, that's recording. Okay, now I'm gonna take the phone and I don't always do stuff with like this much detail. Don't feel like you have to do that. But this for me is fun, like it's creative and obviously I'm not doing this every single day that I'm getting ready for work because there's some days where I just can't be bothered but sometimes there's days like today where I'm just really in the mood to do it and I have the extra time and it's fun for me.  And when I see something that is cool or that I wanna like recreate in a way, put my own spin on it, I will save it and I have so many notes in my phone when I get an idea because that's the thing like with creative stuff like that, if you get an idea for something, if you're not executing it right there and then at least for me, if I'm waiting to like the next day or something, I will completely forget. So I try to make as many detailed notes as I can, screenshot stuff, save stuff. Okay, so now I'm going to just hold my phone and I'm gonna get a clip like sorting through my clothes and pulling out what I'm gonna be wearing. Now I'm gonna get a clip. I'm gonna like toss each item onto the bed. Okay, now I gotta kind of hurry up because I didn't take into account that I was gonna be vlogging as well. Now I have like 20-ish minutes to finish getting ready. So I'm just gonna set up my phone. I'm just gonna hit record on my phone. That way it can be recording and I'm obviously editing this down so I'll just get little clips of me like applying each step and I'll talk to you in the meantime and just make sure that I have a couple seconds of silence in between. But anyway, today should be a very easy, relatively quick day. I have a new client coming in who reached out to me on Instagram. That's the thing. I'll talk about that a little bit more later on but I know it can be overwhelming, feeling like great. Now not only do I have to be like good at doing hair, gotta get my two seconds of quiet. But now it's like there's all this pressure to get content, grow your social media following and whatever. Instagram followers do not equal clients. Just because you have a lot of followers on social media doesn't mean that you're gonna be booked and busy. It might look good, like ooh, look at the numbers. This person has a lot of followers. They must be really successful and hard to get in with and whatever, like I guess if you're more concerned about your image, sure. But the reality is when people follow you on Instagram they can be from all over the planet. There's a good chance that a lot of those people are never going to meet you in real life and are never going to be a client of yours. So unless you're trying to become an influencer don't worry about followers. So if you wanna hop on the trends cause you think it'll be fun, go for it. But don't overwhelm yourself and stress yourself out. And you're like oh my god I have to keep up with all these trends and I need to worry about trending audio and all that kind of stuff. Just think about like your ideal clientele. What would they be interested in seeing? And I'll always think about conversations, like real life conversations that I have at the salon with clients. What kind of stuff are they asking me? Like what hair questions do they have for me? Make a post out of that, you know? They're like oh why do you need to use a toner? What does a toner do? Boom, there's a post idea for you. What's toner? How long does it last? How does it work? Show up before and after? Or a big one that I love to do is showing how the hair can look so different, how it looks so dark when it's wet and freshly toned versus then when you dry it a few minutes later. Cause that's a big one that happens in the salon a lot too, you know?  And you're like don't worry just wait till I dry it. You dry it, they're like oh my God it looks great I love it, it's perfect. That's something that happens pretty often, right? Boom, there's another post.  How'd you originally find me and then what was it that really sealed the deal for you that you ended up booking an appointment? Survey your clients. So that way you know exactly what is actually working for you. But what clients have told me is they love the educational stuff that I post because it really shows that I know what I'm talking about and it makes them feel like they can trust me, makes them feel like they can be relaxed. And I think sharing some personal stuff about yourself people wanna see what you look like.  And I think it's helpful when there's a face behind the profile. So if you have been stuck in this rut of just constantly posting hair like before and afters that's good too obviously. I mean people wanna be able to see your work and know like okay you know what you're doing. But they also wanna know who you are. They wanna feel connected to you. And that can be the determining factor. Like if there's you know three different stylists that they're looking at in the area and all three of you have amazing work but there's something that they can relate to you on like you're a mom and so are they. Maybe the other stylists aren't. Maybe that's something that they feel a connection to you over. And that might end up being the determining factor. Or in my case I live in North Carolina but I'm originally from the Northeast. I've had a lot of clients that are new to the area looking for a stylist and they end up booking with me and feel comfortable with me because we're from the same area. Or like my curly hair clients that book with me because I have curly hair myself. So that's why I also like to share the like get ready with me type stuff. Things that aren't always necessarily hair related or related to the work that I do. But they show a little bit of like my own personal style, my personality.  And people that are gonna be more likely to stay loyal clients to you. It just makes it more personal. I think I'm just gonna do a little side part and call it a day. My hair looks a little bit crazy because I washed it yesterday and then I brushed it out but I didn't put any curl products in it or anything and then I slept on it. So the curls are not really as coiled. I'm gonna get dressed really quick. I'll be right back. Okay, I am ready. I got all of my clips. Here's my outfit. Don't mind the random clothes hanging up. I did laundry last night so certain things I needed to hang dry. So the dress and the leather jacket are very old and they're both from H&M. These boots are new. I got them recently from Target but I am gonna head out of here. I will see you at the salon. So this is what my client's hair looked like before. She was normally going in every six weeks to get a permanent color on her roots to cover the grays and then highlights in between. We talked about trying to transition to something a little bit more low maintenance because she doesn't really have a lot of gray. So I was like, if you don't really want to have to be coming in every six weeks, you don't have to. So yeah, I did some highlights with some low lights, mixed it up so that I could kind of blend out that harsh line of demarcation and then I did a root smudge with an all over toner and all of these clips, I tried to get clips throughout the entire process and these are all clips I can use for future reels but this was her finished hair. But my client was super, super nice and it was nice because since I only had her, I didn't have to rush or worry about running behind so I was able to get lots of content. So I got clips of her hair before, obviously. I got some clips with my, you know, I said at my tripod, I got some clips of her head so you can see me foiling and doing the low lights. Then I got clips, I turned the phone to face me so I could have some clips of me working. That's gonna be really good, like B roll footage that I can use for multiple different reels in the future. I didn't do it today, but I also will get clips, like I'll film in the back when I'm mixing the color, I'll get clips of me mixing up the color.  Sometimes I will point the camera at the client and just get clips of the hair and what I'm doing and then other times, like I said, I'll turn it and face me and get clips of me working as I'm doing everything. And if the client feels weird or uncomfortable, you can position your phone, like I turn them and I'll just record what I'm doing in the back or something like that. So that way their face isn't in it, they don't have to feel awkward or uncomfortable, like they're being put on social media. And depending on the day, like some days the salon is so packed full with people, it's super busy, so I just don't feel comfortable having my tripod out because I'm scared it's gonna get in the way or make other people feel uncomfortable if they're afraid they're gonna be in the background or something like that. So not every day is ideal for getting content when you work in a busy salon, but when I know it's gonna be a day where it's a little slower, I make sure that I take advantage of that and I get as much bulk content as possible. And if you're just starting out and you don't have a full book of clients, that's fine. You can literally make a hundred reels just from one day and one appointment, one client because of all the things that I showed you, like getting ready in the morning, you can do a video of like what I wore to work, how you style your hair, what are your favorite products to use at the salon? What's your hair care routine? What do you recommend? Like, oh, here, you know, my favorite products, if your hair's bleached, here's my favorite products, if you have curly hair, you can do stuff like that. You don't even need to actually have a client in your video. I have clips saved in my phone for months ago that I will still reuse. So yeah, that was my day. I am gonna heat up these leftovers. I thought I was gonna maybe film that sit-down video today, but honestly, I'm just tired of talking. I'm gonna save that for tomorrow because I'm gonna be home all day tomorrow. I'm just gonna take it easy the rest of the day. I'm gonna sort through that content on my phone, put together a reel or two, maybe edit some stuff and like save some audios, get some ideas for the rest of it. I will see you in the morning. It's the next day I look crazy, but this is realistically how I look on the days when I am just home doing like admin behind the scenes type stuff. Right now my schedule has been pretty steady for a while there. It really fluctuated and I didn't have a super set strict schedule. So each week would look different, but lately I take clients up as long on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Sunday, Monday are my days off. That is my weekend. And then Wednesday, Thursday and like sometimes Friday morning, depending on how busy of a week it is and how much I was able to get done Wednesday and Thursday will be my admin days where I like edit videos, film sit down videos if I'm doing that, plan out content for the week. And then, you know, I still, it's hard when you like work for yourself and you have a creative job. It's hard to be like, yep, my working hours are this time to this time these days because I feel like my brain is constantly working.  It's my weekend. I usually will still end up answering emails or you know, I'm still posting reels on Instagram. I'm still responding to comments. I'm still thinking of ideas. I feel like it never fully turns off, but because I love what I do and I'm passionate about it, it doesn't necessarily feel like I'm working. It, to me, it feels like I barely work, but realistically, if you add it up, all of the like minutes and hours that I spend doing things that are technically for my business, it's probably well over 40 hours a week easily. But it doesn't feel like it to me. Oh my God, my client from yesterday just texted me and she said that she's very happy with her hair and she's been getting lots of compliments. That's so nice. Anyway, I'm gonna go shower and get ready and I'll be right back. I'm ready. Of course, by the time, you know, I shower, put on makeup, blow-dried my hair, all that kind of stuff, it got really cloudy again. So we don't have the best natural light, but we're gonna make it work. I do have artificial lights, so I'm gonna set everything up, see how it looks, and then if I feel like I need a little additional lighting to help with the quality, I might have to throw on an artificial light or two, but I am just getting my area set up. I've been filming in the guest bedroom, which this is gonna be also my office at some point. I just have not set it up yet. Since the windows are over here, I can use the natural light, so I usually sit around here and then that is what's in the background behind me. So I need to figure out how I want to decorate that eventually, but for now I've just been taking that faux olive leaf arrangement that I keep on the dining room table, and I've just been putting it in here just to add a little something, taking one of the dining chairs, and that is what I'm gonna sit on. And then I'm gonna pop on this lens. This is a Sigma 30 millimeter. I got it on Amazon. I will link it down below. This lens is super good quality, and it makes the background really blurry. So I like to use this one for sit-down videos. And then I also have an external microphone, also from Amazon, literally all the equipment I use is from Amazon. And this is just like a makeshift mic stand, basically. This is, it's actually for a light, but I mean you can use it for whatever. So I kinda just rigged this a little bit. A distance. This is a little bit too bright, and it's creating a shadow. So I'm gonna throw, I don't have like a proper light cover. I'm just gonna throw a pillowcase over it to diffuse it. Yeah, that just makes it less harsh. So I want it to just kind of look like natural daylight. And he's so good. He's so used to me filming and recording and stuff. So whenever I'm doing that, he just lays down quietly, lets me work. This is what my filming setup looks like. I'm gonna film now and I'll see you when I'm done. I just finished recording my video. It went very well. By the time I'm watching this vlog, it'll already be up. It is my tips for new hairstylist video. And I feel like I'm getting my spark back and I'm falling back in love with everything. Like with doing hair and making content. I don't know, this is like the same feeling I had back in like 2020 and 2021. I was like really, really passionate. I just had all these ideas. And I went through like a weird funk, I guess, with a lot of things changing in my life and figuring out where I wanted to live and personal relationships and whatnot. And I feel like I'm back at a place where I'm feeling settled. And I think being in this apartment too and just having the space again to make content, I'm getting excited again, which feels really good. Definitely let me know if there is anything in particular that you would like to see in the future. Any video topics you want me to do? I am currently working on a few different things. So eventually, like I said, I do want to get that second bedroom set up to be an office so I can work in there and have like a dedicated workspace. But lately I have just been working at the dining room table, which I mean, it works for now. These chairs are actually really comfortable and I have a lot of space to spread out, which is nice. So what I'm doing today, I have a few different things. Number one, I have a YouTube video, the video actually that I filmed yesterday. I need to edit it and upload it at some point today. I also, I was checking my emails and I had a new form submission. I have an appointment form. I reached out to her, we've been texting back and forth so I am getting her booked. And then the last thing that I'm gonna be doing today is I wanna post another Instagram reel and I thought that I would just screen record as I'm doing it so I can also just show you the process because we've talked about how I come up with ideas for the content, how I get the content. Now I wanna show you what I do with it. So let me record my screen. Okay, so like I said, I save audios.  So as I will just be scrolling, I will literally just go through all my reels and if I see an audio that I like or I've been getting served a lot of social media marketing people that are like, here are the trending audios or audios that I predict are going to be trending. So if I see something that I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting. I would click on the audio that's at the bottom of that video. If I see that an audio is trending, but it also has like less than 10,000 reels that have used that, then usually I'm like, ooh, okay, that's good, I definitely wanna save that. So I'll click that little flag in the top corner. I'll go to my saved folder, pull up my audios, see which ones I have, what I wanna use. I know what reel I wanna post right now, like what I want it to look like and what I want it to say. So I just need to find good audio for it. Yeah, this is perfect. So that's like very bivy and chill.  I'm gonna use footage of me working because this reel is gonna be about me and not necessarily about hair. So I wanna make sure you can see my face cause it's gonna be a more personal type of post. And I'm gonna find a good clip.  So I wanna make sure it's a clip where like, I look like I'm smiling and I look like I actually like what I'm doing. I'm just gonna cut that down to like, you know, a few seconds or whatever. I'm gonna save it as a new clip. That way I still have like the original full audio. And then I'm going to bump down the exposure a little bit. And I'm also gonna put the saturation down a little bit. Yeah, perfect. Okay. So now I have this clip that I'm gonna use as my background. Go back to Instagram. I have my audio already pulled up. This is what I'm using. Nice and chill. And it's a trending one and it doesn't have, like hasn't been used that many times yet. So that's perfect. Select my clip. Oh, and I just realized actually, I had this one planned out and I wrote down the text that I wanted to use as an overlay like on the actual video but I didn't type up the caption yet. So normally like I said, I will have the captions pre-made in my notes app. And then I'll just copy and paste. But this time I'm gonna have to write it from scratch.  I'm just gonna cut that down to 10 seconds. And then I'm gonna add my text overlay. After taking a break from hair, I had to start over from scratch. Here's what I'm doing to rebuild my clientele. Read the caption. Give me a second to think of my caption. Then I'll post it. Okay, I finally finished typing out my caption and I posted it. So it's up. If you are following me on Instagram, you probably have already seen it. But that just kind of shows you a little bit about like the process of how I actually make my Instagram reels. And honestly, that's all I've been posting. I haven't been posting any photos on my actual page because I've been finding personally, when I do, it doesn't seem like people are seeing them or engaging with it as much. Like reels really, like it's all just about the short form videos. This is like something that God, I could just talk about forever because there's so much that goes into it. It's a lot and it's constantly changing too. That's the part of it that like gets a little overwhelming. But don't overthink it. Just have fun with it. And the more you start doing it, the more it'll click and the easier it'll get and the more ideas will just come to you. That's what I do and how I do it. So behind the scenes of a work week in my life. I'm gonna end this video here though because I need to get back to doing my work. But thank you guys so much for watching. I hope that this video was helpful. Let me know if you like this and if you wanna see more behind the scenes type stuff or if there's anything that you have questions on or anything that you guys wanna see. Let me know and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.


Each week we've had the pleasure of interviewing people who are significant to our community, and you are one as well, and through your teaching and your involvement in different areas through the Jewish community. But certainly the one that I was hoping that we can spend the most significant amount of time discussing is your work with Jews for Judaism. And as we know that Jews for Judaism certainly has, if not at central point, a lot of what it does is it deals with the Hebrew Christian missionaries. And I know over the years, we've had, I've had the pleasure of being an acquaintance and a friend, and having interacted with you many times, even if you remember the time that we had the Jews for Judaism over at the plaza at Steele's and Bathurst, and we protested outside for a couple of weeks, and they gave, they ended up giving Jews for Judaism an office right next door. That's nothing like living next door to your enemies. So the, we've had really the opportunity for quite a while to get to know each other, and I've been able to see some of your work with Jews for Judaism. I was wondering if you could just give us a bit of an idea of what Jews for Judaism does on a whole, and then what you might do as well outside of that. There's a little bit of a history of Jews for Judaism, because over the years it has undergone some transformation and development in ways that we didn't originally envision. The organization goes back to the really the early 1980s, mid-80s, and it started in two different cities simultaneously unaware of the, unawares of each other. It was started in Los Angeles and in Baltimore. Matty Berger, who now works for the Echatoros, started it in Baltimore. And the Los Angeles and Baltimore offices did not know about each other. They operated independently with the same name. And then when they found out that they were both doing the same thing with the same name, they joined forces. And all the way back then, in the early days of what we were doing, it really had a single focus, meaning that the Jewish community, since the late 60s, early 70s, had been subjected to, as everyone probably in the room knows, pretty aggressive, proselytizing efforts by Hebrew Christian groups like Jews for Jesus. And it took the whole Jewish community by surprise. We weren't used to that. We were used to people coming with crosses and presenting themselves as Christians and trying to convert us. And that's been an old story. But we didn't have any experience dealing with people coming to us with a Jewish face, meaning claiming to be Jews, claiming to practice Judaism, often wearing a kippah, sometimes wearing tzitzit, telling us that they go to synagogue and that they observed the Torah. It was strange for the Jewish world to encounter this kind of experience. It totally took the Jewish world by surprise. And because of that, we actually, we helped them, meaning that in the very early days, what happened was the Jewish community really just went ballistic. And we became very aggressive as a community. It was just fighting them and painting them in the worst terms imaginable and calling them names. And every rabbi in North America would speak about them. And so we gave them a tremendous amount of attention and of publicity. And the other problem was that because the general tendency was to paint them all as evil and wicked and deceptive and nasty and almost monsters, when typical Jewish people met them, they said, well, these people seem very nice. And so in several ways, we really facilitated their successes, both in terms of making sure that every Jew on the planet knew about them. It's quite amazing when you think about it, that if you're starting up a company and you have name recognition among 100% of the population, because I've asked Jewish people all across the world this question, how many of you have heard of Jews for Jesus? Every breathing Jew on the planet has heard of them. And that's quite an astounding success in terms of their ability to get their name out and their message out, because that was the genius of the movement, of their movement, was to call the Jews for Jesus. The reason they did that and the reason that they took a very in-your-face kind of approach where they would go out on the street and they would buttonhole people and give out literature, they were very visible and they wanted it like that. They wanted to provoke a reaction, but they also wanted this name to get out. They wanted Jews to know there's an organization called Jews for Jesus. Why was that so important to them? Because for the typical Jewish person, there has always been this assumption that Christianity and Jesus are not on the menu for us. If you speak to Jewish people that have converted to Christianity over the past 50, 60 years, they'll all tell you that it was very hard. One of the reasons that it was so hard is that they were the only Jew they knew who came to believe in Jesus. They felt so lonely. They felt so isolated. There was this implicit assumption that Jews don't believe in Jesus. That's just the conventional wisdom. You don't have to know anything. You don't have to know a word of the Bible. You don't have to know any history. This was the conventional wisdom among all Jews. Jews don't believe in Jesus. It's not on the menu for us. It's not an option. Their goal was to make sure that every Jew within earshot would know there is such an organization called Jews for Jesus because they wanted Jewish people to know there are Jews who believe in Jesus. It's on the menu. Initially, our work was directed explicitly and exclusively and directly to counter their activities. That's what we were initially focused on. The work initially was educating the Jewish community, raising awareness because the Jewish community didn't really know who these people were. They didn't understand these people. What is motivating them? What are their tactics? What are their strategies? What is this all about just to understand them? It's also important in terms of warning people about them to just get the word out. A lot of our work initially was building awareness, letting the Jewish community know there was such a problem, why it's a problem. Many Jewish people didn't understand why it's a problem. What difference does it make if a Jew believes in Jesus? They don't understand what's at stake. Many Jewish people don't understand what Christians actually believe about Jesus. It's interesting. One of the things that I teach my classes is that traditional normative Christianity believes that Jesus is God. They always scream back at me, no, they don't believe that. They just believe he's the Son of God, as if Son of God is not God. I have to explain to them, no, for Christians, Son of God is God. They believe in a three-part God, God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When you let Jewish people know that this is one of the things that's at stake here, that you're not just believing that some Jewish fellow from 2000 years ago was the Messiah. When a Jew embraces this, they're worshiping him as God, and that's idolatry. Idolatry is something that most Jewish people have a real adversion to. It's interesting, and we taught this, is that if you read the training manuals of groups like Jews for Jesus, they would train their missionaries that in the initial stages of evangelism don't talk about this idea that Jesus is God. Just talk about him as the Messiah, because that's not so off-putting to Jewish people. That's what our initial focus was, raising awareness, explaining to the Jewish community who these people were, and counseling. We were in touch with numerous families who lost children or other people in their families, sometimes adults. Those were the focus of our work was education. We called it preventative education and counseling and building awareness. But then what happened, you have to remember, this was the early 80s. There was another phenomenon that was taking place back then, which we don't see so much about anymore. It hasn't disappeared, but it was quite prevalent back then in the late 60s, 70s, and even to the 80s, which was the proliferation of various cults in the world. Unfortunately, Jewish people tended to be overly represented beyond our percentage in the population in these groups. They were all kinds of cults. They were psychotherapeutic cults and cults that were from Eastern religions and political cults. You name it. What happened was we didn't really even know about these groups, but because there wasn't anyone else in the Jewish community that was responding to a cries for help from parents who were also losing their family members to these kinds of groups, they ended up in our lap. We had to learn on the job. That became a secondary focus of our work after dealing with the Christian missionaries was dealing with cults. Then I would say around 1995 to 1998, approximately around that time, we had another epiphany. We realized by this time, it took us about 15 years, that Jews for Jesus is not the problem. We finally realized that. They're not the problem. We came to realize that they are simply a symptom of the problem. The real problem is a disconnect between Jews and Judaism. What led us to that realization was seeing not just Jewish people getting caught up in churches and in cults, but seeing that about 25% of North American Buddhists came from a Jewish background. Seeing the tremendous number of Jews involved with the New Age movements and New Age religions. Basically seeing that the disaffection, the falling through the cracks of Jewish people was not just to Christianity and cults. It was to dozens and dozens and dozens of different locations on the spiritual map. We thought about this and we came to realize that it's really all the same problem. The fourth issue that got thrown into this mixture was assimilation and intermarriage. That's what led us to think about what's the common denominator of all of these problems. The problems of Jews converting to Christianity or getting involved with cults or Buddhism or assimilating into marrying. It's basically that they're not strongly connected to their spiritual core. They're not strongly connected to Judaism. When that problem exists, that's the real problem. The same way in medicine, you can have an underlying medical issue, but it can present in different ways. It can present as a pain in your stomach. The same problem in other people can present as a pain in their lower back. Some people could be in their side. The underlying problem we came to realize was not Jews for Jesus. It was Jews that were disconnected from Judaism. We woke up and said, that makes sense. We didn't name our organization Jews Against Jesus. We named it Jews for Judaism. At that point, it took us into a little bit of a different direction. We continued doing all of our work that we were doing, dealing with Christian missionaries and dealing with cults and dealing with the challenges of Eastern religions and dealing with the challenges of Jews assimilating and intermarrying. A bigger component of our work became trying to help Jewish people connect with the spiritual treasures of Judaism. Anyone now, for example, that goes to our YouTube channel, will see that about half of our videos deal with the challenges of Christianity, the claims that Christian missionaries make, what is the Jewish response to Christianity, how do we understand questions like who the Messiah is, and how do you get forgiven for your sins. But about half of our videos deal with Jewish spiritual issues, everything from yoga to meditation to life after death. We have hundreds of videos and what we have found is that for many Jewish people worldwide, this has become, thank God, their entry point back into Judaism. I would say that's pretty much our work at this point. There are a few related issues, and I'll just stop there because I don't want to spend the whole time answering that one question. The related issues are that because we've spent so much time studying these areas, so we become consultants to Jewish communities throughout the world when it comes to their communal responses to these problems. Just as an example, there's a massive movement today in the world of Christian Zionists. These are evangelical Christians who are very deeply supportive of Israel. We are always asked this question, are these people, is this group that wants to do a program at our synagogue, they want to partner with us, they want to go to Israel with us, what have you, are they okay? And so we will do a lot of that kind of investigating, if I can use that word, to help Jewish communities understand who we're dealing with. And it's very interesting. I'll just mention one fascinating story. I had written a column, and I think it was the Jewish press before I moved to Toronto, and I exposed a Christian missionary that was really a stealth missionary. Many Jewish people had no idea this person had any kind of agenda to convert Jews. Everyone thought he was the greatest thing in the world, very loving Israel, loving the Jews, and when I came here, I got a phone call from a reporter from a newspaper in New Jersey who said that they had read my articles, and they remember that I mentioned an organization called Friends of Israel Gospel Ministries. It wasn't the name of the group that I had been writing about, I just mentioned them in passing. And he said that in his town in New Jersey, the Jewish Federation is every year going on trips to Israel with a group called Friends of Israel. And he wanted to know if this group is okay, Friends of Israel. So I sent him a package, a whole package, because I get their magazines and I have done a tremendous amount of research about this group. I told him, look, Friends of Israel is not their real name. The real name is Friends of Israel Gospel Ministries, and they are dedicated aggressively to trying to convert Jews. They have a whole institute, they train missionaries and they do missionary work in Israel itself. And he wrote an article about it, and the President of the Federation went ballistic. It was very upset. And he said, I've been to Israel with these people many times. They never tried to convert me. And I had to speak to this President of the Federation and explain, in your mind, what does it mean that someone's going to try to convert you? Does it mean that they have to whip out a New Testament and get you to read passages from Matthew? I said, that's not how they operate. And again, that's part of what we do is explain to the Jewish community how missionaries operate. Missionaries have something that they call lifestyle evangelism or friendship evangelism.  So they believe that the most effective thing they can do in order to get Jewish people to be more interested in their faith is simply to be loving and to be supportive and to be nice and to be friendly. And so this unfortunately naive person assumed that this organization, Friends of Israel, was totally par of because in his mind, they never tried to convert him. But they didn't realize that every single thing they were doing, everything they were doing was for the ultimate purpose of getting him and his group to ultimately think more positively about Christianity. So that's one thing that we do is we're basically a community liaison. We help provide information for Jewish leaders, teachers, teachers that are teaching this subject matter will call us for recommendations for curriculum. We often go into schools to teach. And then just I'll mention one more thing and I'll stop, which is something that has been totally unexpected. I would say of all the things that we do that we did not plan for, did not think about, did not expect, did not anticipate. It took place when we started our YouTube channel. Prior to the YouTube channel, a hundred percent of our interaction with people was with the Jewish community. We would speak at synagogues. We would teach classes at Jewish organizations. We would publish material that went into the hands of Jewish people. But as soon as we started a YouTube channel, we didn't really anticipate this, but it's sort of a no-brainer about 90% at least of the people that are going to be watching our YouTube videos are not Jewish. And so one of the things that's happened over the years is there's been an impact on the Christian world as a result of the kind of work that we've been doing, meaning that for the first time now, Christians who have never been exposed to Judaism or any Jewish ideas, the only thing that they know about Judaism is what they learn in their churches. And now you have hundreds of thousands, millions, actually. I don't remember the last number of our video views. I think it was like five or six million.  So one of the things that's happened over the years is that I would say maybe seven or eight, nine, 10 years ago, I would get one phone call or one email every few months from a Christian who said, you know, rabbi, I think you guys are right. What do I do now? Now it's about one or two a day. So this is something that was, I would say, collateral damage in a sense. We didn't expect to be dealing with so many people that are coming from a non-Jewish background that are questioning their faith now. In regard to Christianity, there's sort of mainstream Christianity. And would you say that mainstream Christianity buys into the things that the Jews for Jesus and these types of organizations say, or are they openly different and openly perhaps against what they're doing? So it's a good question because, you know, as Jews, we're used to the idea that the Jewish community is not monolithic. You know, most Jews are aware that, you know, you have different denominations in the Jewish community and different groups and we're not all exactly the same. But we tend to think that everyone else, everyone that's Christian is just Christian. We don't appreciate the fact that they are incredibly diverse. There are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world. You know, when you think about 2.2 billion Christians, the 0.2 part of that is 200 million. And we're about 15, 16 million. There are, according to some estimates, about 30,000 Christian denominations. You know, we've all heard of Baptists, for example, but there are about 300 kinds of Baptists. So you're talking about a very, very, very diverse world.  You know, for many Christians, religion was a contact sport. So the truth is that what I've been describing is not universally supported in the Christian world.  You have the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Christian churches, like the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox. So let's say there are about a half of the Christian world right there. The Roman Catholic Church is almost a billion people. And let's say everyone else, more or less, is Protestant. That's where you have all these different denominations. Now among Protestants, you have two major, let's say you could divide them into two major groups. You have what we would call liberal Protestants, like, for example, the United Church of Canada is a liberal Protestant group. I'll just tell a very wild story just for a second while I'm on this. Years ago, some of you might remember that there was a funeral that was interrupted. There was one of the leading Jews for Jesus missionaries passed away and was supposed to be buried in the Jewish cemetery here in Toronto. And basically the funeral was called off, I mean they had to bury him in a non-denominational cemetery. But prior to his passing away, I was on a television program with him in Toronto. We were interviewed, I forget the name of the program. But it was a religious show and there were two parts to the program. The first segment, the first 15 minutes, was the new, I forget what he's called now, the offices. But there's the head of the United Church, there's a title that they have. And there was a new one. He came from Calgary. His name was Bill Phipps, I think, William Phipps, Philip Phipps. And it was fascinating interview to hear because this fellow, who was the head of the United Church, did not believe in the virgin birth, did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, did not believe that you had to believe in Jesus to go to heaven, basically didn't believe in anything that Christianity believed in. And then he had his segment was over and then I went on with this fellow from Jews for Jesus. And the premise of our exchange was he's going to be claiming that what he believes is very Jewish. And I'm going to basically be saying, no, not really. What you're believing is not really Jewish. So we're having our discussion back and forth. And the host of the program at one point turns to this fellow that I'm debating incredulously and says to him, you're Jewish? She said to him, you're more Christian than the head of the United Church. So basically you have a lot of what we would call liberal Protestants. And they have absolutely zero interest in any of these things. They see the evangelical Christians, meaning what I would call the conservative Protestants, the evangelical Protestants, they see them as lunatics. And as people that they can't tolerate, they see them as closed-minded, as bigoted, as hostile to everything that they value and believe. So you don't have this Jews for Jesus kind of proselytizing supported by liberal Protestants. And it's not really supported by the Catholic Church either. So we're talking about, let's say, the flavor of Christians that back this kind of evangelism. We usually refer to them as the evangelical Protestant movement, which is quite large. As we know in the United States, for example, they number about 25 to 40% of Americans identified as evangelical. We know that in the United States, they are a serious voting block. In Canada, it's only about 10%. Only about 10% of Canadians identify as evangelical. But still it's a serious number of people worldwide. And so to answer your question, not all Christians are in support of this kind of evangelism, but a serious number are. And the more important thing to be aware of is not just the numbers. They always talk about when you're driving a car, there's a speed of the car and there's the acceleration. And what's important to understand about these particular Christians that are obsessed with converting Jews, by the way, not just converting Jews, they want to convert the whole world. But Jews are a special target to them. They have a special affinity in their heart to convert Jews. What's different about these Christians, as opposed to others, is the degree of their passion and faith. These are people that are 1,000% sold on their faith. They say that the best salesperson is someone who really believes in their product. It could be a lousy product. But if the salesperson believes in the product, 1,000%, they're going to be successful at selling it. So the thing to remember about these evangelical Protestants is that they are very, very, very gunk-ho and sincere about their faith. I see. So now, you mentioned that one of the biggest issues is really Jewish ignorance, that Jews don't know what they really believe. And then they'll come across these people and be enticed. But it just seems to be funny, because here, if you have a Jew who doesn't seem to be overly interested in religion, who's walking down the street and comes across somebody with a t-shirt that says, Jews for Jesus, and they give them a pamphlet with some picture of some rabbi on it, I don't see what they're going to do to them. How's that going to affect somebody?  So this is a very important question. And it is important to understand their modus operandi, because you're right, when people go out on the street with t-shirts handing out Jews for Jesus' literature, they know, they're not unaware of the fact that this is not the most effective way of reaching people. In sales, for example, it would be the equivalent of cold-colling. The worst kind of sales to do is cold-colling. So why do they do it?  So for a few reasons. I mentioned before that they are very, very invested in making sure that they have product recognition. They want every Jew to be aware that there is such a thing as Jews who believe in Jesus, so that it's not off the menu. It's not absurd. And so that's one reason why they're out there. They want to keep their presence in our consciousness. Another reason is, we often don't think about this, there's a lot of competition among groups that are trying to convert Jews. Jews for Jesus, we use that term generically to refer to any such group, but there are hundreds and hundreds of different organizations that are trying to convert Jews. Don't we feel special? There are so many organizations that are trying to convert us. Literally, I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds and they compete for dollars. They compete for support. And so one of the things that Jews for Jesus does, they know that people are busy, people are not interested, the last thing that a Jew wants to do is talk to some Jews for Jesus, be sure to get on the street. But who does go up to them on the street and say, you're doing a great job, we love what you're doing. Christians that believe that it's important to convert Jews. And these Christians that they meet on the street will be happy to get their contact information, to receive their newsletter and to become a supporter. So they have their reasons for why they're out on the street. Now, in terms of how is it that they're able to ultimately reach Jewish people, so I'll share with you a secret. They spend very little time on the street handing out literature. They don't do this a lot because, again, they know that this is not the most effective way of reaching Jews. But one of the things, if you wanted to follow a Jews for Jesus staff person and see what they do all day long, they do a tremendous amount of programming in churches. They give lectures in churches. They have programs like, for example, the Messiah and the Passover where they try to show that the Passover Seder was the last supper and they have a whole bunch of different programs they do in churches. Now, you could ask why in the world are they going to waste their time going to churches? How many Jews are going to be in those churches? Zero. But what they're doing when they go to these churches is, number one, encouraging evangelical lay people, meaning the regular churchgoers, encouraging them to try to influence their Jewish friends and neighbors and business associates. Now, Jews for Jesus did a study. They actually did a survey many years ago of 8,000 Jews who converted to Christianity. And they asked them, what was it that led you to Jesus? And as you can imagine, almost no one said, well, because someone gave me this fascinating pamphlet on the street. But virtually everyone said it was through the influence of a Christian friend, neighbor, or business associate. These are the people that are going to be effective. And you have to realize that the missionary on the street has several strikes against him. Number one, he has no relationship with this Jewish person. He's annoying. It's an annoying thing to be trying to go somewhere in downtown Toronto, and some guy stops you on the street and tries to give you a pamphlet. It's like cold calling. Again, there's no real relationship. Number two, the Jewish person is usually offended by these people. We see them as traitors or as annoying. But there's not a lot of rapport. But the evangelical Christian who goes to church and has a Jewish friend or Jewish neighbor or Jewish business associate, so there it's not cold calling. There's a real relationship. This is the kind of person that may come to borrow some sugar from you. They may want to borrow your lawnmower. They may whatever neighbors do, whatever co-workers do, whatever friends do, could be even a relative. So they don't have that problem of cold calling because there's a relationship already. And you don't have the problem of seeing a Jewish person that's trying to influence you. And we're bothered by that. This is a non-Jew. This is a Christian. They're supposed to believe in Jesus. So we don't have the negative reaction to our Christian friends, neighbors, and business associates. So what Jews for Jesus does, and not just them, the other groups as well, they do a lot of programming in churches to encourage these Christians to try to share their faith with their Jewish friends and neighbors because you have to appreciate your typical Christian layperson is very intimidated by Jews. They think Jews are all Old Testament Bible scholars. It's like when I was growing up, you thought that any kid from Japan must have been a karate expert. So a lot of Christians, they say to themselves, I can't talk to my Jewish neighbor about Jesus. They know the Old Testament by heart. They're going to destroy me. So the Jews for Jesus people tell them, don't worry, the average Jewish person never even read the Bible once. And then what they do is they explain how important it is because a lot of Christian people might feel that it's not sensitive to try to convert Jews. They just went through the Holocaust, leave them alone, and the Jews for Jesus will say, are you kidding? That's the most antisemitic thing you can do in the world is not to tell them about Jesus. Do you want them going straight from the fires of Auschwitz to the fires of hell?  So they spend a lot of time trying to encourage Christian laypeople about how important it is to convert Jews and encourage them to, what they use the term, witness or share, share their faith, witness to their Jewish friends, neighbors, and business associates. And then they train them. What are you supposed to say to a Jew? What shouldn't you say? How do you make an inroad? How do you introduce yourself? And they have books and they have CDs and they have websites and they have training and they have pamphlets and they train these Christians how to more effectively reach their Jewish friends and neighbors. Now that's the first stage of what happens. The first stage is basically mobilizing this massive army, massive army of committed, born-again evangelical laypeople to reach out to the Jewish friends and neighbors. I've got to mention the third advantage that you have by doing this. How many people work for Jews for Jesus? They may have only five or six people working in their office but you have, I don't know how many evangelical Protestants living in Toronto, but let's say at least 100,000, probably a lot more than that. So it's just the most effective thing that they can do is to mobilize this army of potential salespeople. And then what happens is this, they tell them, take it slow, don't rush. You may have to first ask a lot of questions about Judaism.   What's Rosh Hashanah all about? And then build slowly to the point where you can maybe after you gain their trust start maybe talking about other spiritual things about your prayer life. You know, the ones that are smart know to do it subtly and slowly. But they know, and this is the most important piece here, they know that Jewish people have a tremendous resistance to believing in Jesus. And they know that there's a lot of guilt. And so even if they're able to get their Jewish friend or neighbor to be interested in Jesus, to be interested in the gospel, to be interested in Christianity, the Jewish person they know is always going to have this objection. They might say, you know what? I really find Jesus to be compelling. I think your reasons for believing in him are compelling, but Jews don't believe in Jesus. That's the hang up, but Jews don't believe in Jesus. So this is where the Christian who's been going to church and went to the seminar that Jews for Jesus ran is able to say, well, I know someone who's Jewish and believes in Jesus. Would you like to meet them? Who is that person who's Jewish and believes in Jesus? It's the Jews for Jesus staff person that came to their church and gave them their business card. So what the Jews for Jesus staff people do, they're not running around the city cold calling all day long. They know that's a poor use of their time. They are number one, spending some of their time mobilizing a army of salespeople. But then if you're familiar with sales, they come in at the end of the process. I should say process, I'm here in Canada now. They come in at the end when the Jewish person is biting but has the hesitation, but I'm Jewish. Jews don't believe in Jesus. And now the Christian neighbor or friend can say, well, I know someone that's Jewish and believes in Jesus. Would you like to be an introduction to them? And then he gives them the business card or the phone number or connects them with email with the director of Jews for Jesus here. And now what are the Jews for Jesus staff people spend their time doing in Toronto? They're closing sales, they're closers. And so they will meet with someone at a coffee shop. They'll meet with someone in their living room at their breakfast table. And what they're doing is just getting that Jewish person who's interested and who's biting but they're getting them over that final hump because they can say, I'm Jewish, I believe in Jesus. And this is how I live my life. And that's often for Jewish people, the last step that's all that's needed. So the thing I wanted to add is that the conversion the conversion of Jewish people is generally speaking, I would say, not an intellectual process. It's not that the Christian has proven to them intellectually or proven to them through the Bible that they should believe in Jesus. I would say that the two more important pieces are emotional and spiritual. What do I mean by that? By emotionally, what I would say is that they have been successful in fostering a culture where first of all, almost everyone that goes to their congregations is committed to reaching out. It's not the exceptional person. So they have managed, they did this successfully. They've managed to create a culture where the entire church is committed to outreach which means that they are friendly, they're welcoming, they're accepting, they're loving. For Jewish people who have not found that in their Jewish community, this is tantalizing. This is almost irresistible. And I hear this kind of scenario literally all the time that a Jewish person who for whatever reason was not connecting, was lonely, was unhappy, you will find that the vast majority of Jewish people that convert to Christianity or join a cult or whatever, they had some vulnerability, meaning that they had something that rendered them vulnerable to what the missionaries were offering. And usually it is some kind of a pain, a hurt, loneliness, guilt could be tremendous guilt. Christianity is majors in alleviating guilt. That's one of the main selling points. Someone let's say might have tremendous guilt that they had an abortion or that they, I don't know that they did something terrible to someone. Christianity comes along and says that if you believe in Jesus, all your sins are forgiven and you will live in heaven forever, have eternal life. So I would say that one of the things that the vast majority of converts have in common is some kind of emotional vulnerability. The other issue is spiritual, meaning that what you will generally hear, for example, when I speak to Jews who've converted to Christianity, you almost always hear the same story. This is how it goes. Yeah, I was Jewish. I went to Hebrew school. I had a bar about mitzvah. We lit Chanukah candles at home. Family had Passover satyrs. I went to Israel as a teenager, but I never experienced any of it in a spiritual way. I never encountered God. As a matter of fact, they'll say, you know what? No one even ever spoke about God. And you'll find people who generally never had meaningful, satisfying spiritual experiences in the Jewish world. And so those two things make people vulnerable because people have spiritual needs. People have emotional needs. And the Christians are really good. I mean, if you want to see something they do well, they know how to take advantage of these two weaknesses. And I would say that far beyond the intellectual arguments and reasons, I would say those things only come at the end to seal the deal, meaning once someone is already leaning towards Christianity and emotionally wants to accept it, they're very good at giving them the reasons why they should believe in it. And I think that unless the person is predisposed to wanting to believe in it, I don't think their arguments are usually that persuasive. But once the person is already leaning towards Christianity, they're vulnerable and they want to believe in it, I think that the missionaries are really quite capable of making it sound reasonable and compelling. So it would sound to me that if we as a community want to try to safeguard our members, be it people who are refugees that have come over without education or even our own children or our own neighbors, really the most effective thing for us to do besides some education is really making sure that we have communities, we have institutions that care about each other, that it's not institutional, it's personal that you have rabbis that care about our members and members who care about each other and people who go out of their way when somebody is ill or has a death in the family. And as I mentioned to you when we were speaking earlier before this interview, I mentioned about somebody who was a friend of my father's who had suffered a loss in his family and so sitting in an airport, somebody walked over him and said, basically told him, you look lonely and sad and they basically were able to really get into him and to change his outlook on Christianity simply on this type of Christianity simply because they were friendly to him while the average Jew was not. And it's something that I think that our communities are lacking in and that we need to really build on is our ability to look at each other and to see the people in pain and see people in need and to reach out to them and to let them know we're not gonna judge them and that they're welcome and that we're here to help them and we really do care because I believe that any synagogue, any institution that Jewish institution, any organization that you go to, the people care. They're just afraid to show it or they're not organized to show it and you would see that this is the number one way for us to combat the loss of Jews to other religions is to make sure that Jews feel like they're a part of the Jewish community. But would you agree with that? Yeah, I would say that and I would couple that with developing and fostering Jewish communities, especially religious communities like the schools and the synagogues that put a focus on God, put a focus on having a relationship with Hashem with the importance of having a personal relationship with God. When you speak to Christians and you speak to Jews who've embraced Christianity and you ask them, what did you find in Christianity? About 100% of them will tell you, I now have a personal relationship with God. Now, it's interesting that Christianity makes that easier because they offer a God that you can see. You can put the Christian God on your nightstand and look at the picture. And that's powerful. We shouldn't underestimate, we think that idolatry is something that disappeared a long time ago. But the idea that Christians believe Jesus is God and it's much easier to have a relationship with a human being. As a matter of fact, they were very smart. They didn't just make Jesus a human being that you could see. He is the perfect human being. He's gorgeous, he's handsome. He's like an Adonis. And I always joke that if Jesus had actually been a short, fat, bold Jewish guy, they probably wouldn't be two billion Christians in the world today. But it's packaging. And here they have this ideal human being that people can fall in love with and can have fantasies about. But what happens ultimately is they believe that they are building a relationship with God. And so they might pray either to Jesus or they might pray to God through Jesus. But the focus in the evangelical world is on faith. The focus is on a relationship with God. And I would say that in addition to those, I'd say to two pillars would be to cultivate communities that are caring and accepting and welcoming and communities that have a passion that are focused on the spiritual side of Judaism, on prayer that is enthusiastic and passionate, on doing mitzvot mindfully and as a way of connecting to God. And I think that's important. I think that when I speak to Christians, they all grew up in Jewish homes and Jewish Christians, Jews that have converted, they all will tell you that they experience Chanukah and Passover, but they will all say that it was never spiritual. They'll say it was just tradition. It was ethnicity, it was their culture, it was their heritage, it was their identity. But they'll tell you that there was nothing about it that was framed in terms of getting closer to God. And I would say that those two are the most important things. And then I would say to sprinkle on top of that, it wouldn't hurt for Jewish people to know a little bit about the Tanakh and what our belief is about the Mashiach and why we don't believe in Jesus, but that you can do that in a few classes to be able to build communities that are caring and are welcoming and accepting and are spiritual. That requires a lot more work. The intellectual piece I think is actually quite easy and the least important in the sense of keeping people safe. I mean, obviously to be a Jew, it's very important to know and to have understanding, but I don't think it's the top item in terms of what makes people vulnerable. I have not met really many Jewish people probably none who converted to Christianity because they was intellectually proven to them. It plays a very, very small component. Let's see. So we really have our marching orders now, it seems like of how our communities and our individuals and our classes and synagogue should be. So it's something I hope everybody takes to heart and that's something that we can work on. But now that we're down to the last few minutes, I thought I'd ask if you have any project or program that you're presently working on or that is actually happening right now that you'd like to let everybody know about? Well, our main program right now is to get over COVID-19 so that we can get back into the driver's seat and do the kind of programming that we're used to doing. We are still doing the counseling. I just have a long counseling session today with someone and we usually have about a year's worth of YouTube videos that are in queue to be uploaded.  Now I give a lecture and within a few weeks there are a few thousand people who've seen it and our videos now are getting about 5,000 views every day, I think even more than that. So that part of our work continues and as a result of that way of reaching out into the community and into the world, so people contact us through email, through phone, through Facebook, whatever. We have a pretty active presence on social media but I think that once we can get back into actually doing live programs, I mean, I don't mind Zoom, but whenever I look at a Zoom screen it looks like Hollywood squares to me. So it's not the same as actually being with people and seeing them close up and in person. That's certainly true. But look, this has been an illuminating hour. I'm sure all of the people who are sitting in with us and those who will be watching this later agree with me that it's really been a pleasure to spend an hour with you but also very illuminating and interesting and it has really given me some food for thought and I hope everyone else who's here in order to learn how we can best deal with our Jewish brothers and sisters and to help keep them on the Jewish path and help keep them in a way that is beneficial for them. So on behalf of all of us I would like to thank Rawej Skobak for his time and his creativity and his knowledge. We really appreciate it at the time with you very much. And that may continue. Thank you very much. We hope we'll continue in the future and I wish you and everyone with us a very good night. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Amazing.


Good morning. How we doing? Everybody awake Well, those of you that are here right looks about 50% of the audience we had yesterday Must have been a lot of late nights. All right. Well, thanks for coming So I woke up this morning and I was inspired to change my entire talk Largely because Bjorn from SAP yesterday had such a wonderful eye chart of boxes and lines That make up the the cloud platforms. So should we pull that slide up and maybe walk through box by box? Yeah, yeah, no, I'm just kidding that I joke but there's there's a lot of complexity in Cloud Foundry and so what I want to talk to you today about is The combination of the enterprise readiness of this open source project and the innovation that's happening Both inside the project teams and around it in our ecosystem and our community Now I love starting talks with this, you know, really simple slide So those of you that are developers and hopefully about half of you are developers You recognize this right sort of a moment of anticipation. You wrote some code. You're ready to go It's time to push it into the platform and you know it's gonna be ready for production at that point Well, assuming you don't have any bugs it's a moment for developer where you get to Be free to release the software quickly and Anci from from Pivotal a while back wrote this awesome haiku Here's my source code run it on the cloud for me. I do not care how and There's a lot behind that promise So let's spend some time digging in underneath it Now I was an enterprise technology as a buyer for many many many years and There's one thing that I know that enterprise ready means it means there's a sales guy with a quote who wants me to sign But I kid and all of the account executives in the room I'm not talking about you if you're you know talking about cloud foundry, of course, right? This is enterprise ready software. So what is what is enterprise ready mean for the cloud foundry ecosystem? It really boils down to four key attributes and these are the themes that we're gonna talk about today The first is secure Cloud Foundry is being used in some of the most highly secure IT environments globally Second well integrated right because an application on its own is fairly useless You need great backing services.  What is legacy? But the thing that you already pushed to production yesterday, right? Being well integrated Third scalable right because we're not only being used heavily by large enterprises I mean you heard the numbers from Comcast yesterday. We're being used by large-scale public cloud providers to offer has So it needs to scale and last but not least is that great developer experience and that includes integration with IDEs That includes integration with developer workflows. So this is this is what enterprise ready means to cloud foundry ecosystem Now I was a web developer, but but if you imagine your user and you don't know much about how technology is built You know when you think about is this app that I'm using secure really? It comes down to the simple little icon that shows up in your browser, right? You're like, oh, yeah, sure. They must be a secure app But we all know that there's a lot more behind that and if we dig into what cloud foundry is We've got this control plane with lots and lots of components and they're all talking to each other And there's lots of communication going on and we've got all the applications being deployed They're talking to the components underneath it. They're talking to each other There's a lot of communication paths that have to be secured So our community has been doing two things So the first is that they've been going through each one of the components that make up our control plane and Ensuring that the communications from each component whether it's one of our services like UAA To the cloud controller or whether it's the cloud controller to its database is secure so that we can be trusted to run in public environments The second thing that's been happening is a lot of innovation around how do you secure the applications themselves make it really easy for a developer To secure communication between their two microservices So we've got a lot of great stuff happening and We're about 90% of the way there in terms of the control plane. At least that's the latest number that you a cow gave me So I think we're close to being completely Encrypted in all our internal communications And if we dig a little bit deeper into the platform we we go into a single Diego cell We run into garden. This is the lowest level container abstraction in inside our platform Now I love our garden team because they've they've really made it their mission and it's lofty goal Their mission is to be the most secure Container runtime for a multi-tenant application platform in the industry now. It's a great goal and They spent a lot of effort Adopting run see this is a place where our collaboration with another open-source ecosystem comes to bear run See is the project that came from Docker was brought to the open container initiative and it along with the open container Image format specification represent the building blocks for container-based platforms And our garden teams focused on security so they've of course you see groups of resource resource constraints But app armor username spaces in its set comp are all enabled by default These are really important kernel features that allow us to have a robust isolation between the different containers running in the system So now I want to step back a little bit and talk about a project called cred hub Some of you might have heard of cred hub. It's an incubating project recently joined the foundation Cred hub is solving a problem that emerges when you're dealing with these complex distributed systems And I think it solves it very elegantly. It thinks about credentials Really with four pillars. What are the things we need to do with any credential? We need to be able to generate new ones. We need to be able to of course encrypt it both for in transit as well as at Rest we need to be able to persist it and we want to make rotation really easy And we want to expose that through policy and make it an option for admins to use The apps themselves to use and the infrastructure to use. There's really great example of the applications themselves Our Diego team has been integrating cred hub and what they've done is they've said every application instance running on a Diego cell Could potentially have its own unique certificate, which would not only identify the instance or the container But also allow it to naturally secure its communication with all of the other app instances or micro other microservices that it might be using All right, so in in the software industry We really know one thing about software quality and that's the number of bugs that any software has, right? that equations n plus one where n equals the number of bugs you currently know about and Of course some of those bugs are going to be vulnerabilities. This is just the reality of complex software Software is difficult to build We do our best to have secure coding practices, but open-source software proprietary software There's a constant stream of new fixes that need to be rolled out into environments So imagine for a second you were going to go build a system just like Cloud Foundry yourself Not by using Cloud Foundry, but by building all of the pieces and parts necessary to create this level of a platform You'd probably start first by picking an operating system Now they have a constant stream of vulnerabilities and I'd argue having done this at a managed service provider We still really haven't figured out as an IT industry how to effectively patch manage at scale diverse operating systems Then these are building up a whole bunch more dependencies, right databases message brokers You've got the programming language that your developers are using in the frameworks things like no JS or the spring framework And last you've got the platform itself And whether that's a combination of open-source software you've pulled together or whether it's a bunch of Python scripts that somehow Deploy applications and manage them. There's a lot of risk In a platform like this Now what the Cloud Foundry open-source community does for the entire Ecosystem is bring a level of maturity that is really unparalleled in open-source software We release an entire platform from a base operating system all the way up to the build packs that support the custom apps that are being deployed This is incredibly important to our ecosystem all of the downstream distributions get the value of it and All of the direct open-source users get the same value We do it at a high velocity to our coordinated releases are averaging over twice a month and they can be kicked out extremely rapidly Has anybody here heard of cloud.gov? Few of you so we talk about it periodically at conferences. They've they've given given talks I think in one of our events in Berlin Cloud.gov is a online service that was created by a group inside the US federal government called 18f 18f's entire job is to find ways to allow Technology and some of the learnings we have around how you develop software more agile techniques devops practices How to how to support? That learning and support the adoption of technology that's much more modern in all the government departments agencies bureaus whoever's interested And so they launch cloud.gov. It's a pure open-source implementation of Cloud Foundry including backing services But what's really cool about it is that in order to be effectively adopted across the federal government They had to get what's called a Fed ramp authorization now That may be a very boring bureaucratic bureaucratic term, but if anybody here has done any government work You understand that that fed ramp authorization is exceptionally hard to get in February of this year they received that authorization and became the first open-source service to get fed ramp authorization Now they did that and I look at that and say that's a sign of the open source upstream Demonstrating the quality and its enterprise readiness number one, but number two they did in an extremely transparent way So if you're in a different industry financial services insurance Manufacturing you have your own regulatory scheme that you need to worry about you can go find 18f's Public documents that talk about how they deployed Cloud Foundry how they operated how those procedures and technologies map to their controls So go take a look. It's an amazing example of governments finding a way to be participants in the open-source world, but also Build up the possibility of better citizen engagement All right, so let's transition to scale now There are also mics over there 250,000 application instances That's containers for those of you that want to hear that word late last year the Diego team Reached the quarter million containers being deployed and managed by the Cloud Foundry platform But see here's the thing. It wasn't a false test This was a realistic performance and scale test. It included applications of varying sizes It also included applications that were purposefully designed to inject fault to shut themselves down That demonstrated that the system continued to keep its promise of the apps staying alive It demonstrated that we could drive massive throughput through the system and it also Gave us some opportunities for additional improvement now. I'm going to pick on one team mostly because they did really great work a Routing tier is part of the data path as a user of an application when I make a request view my web browser It's going to flow through the system. The first thing it's going to hit is the routing tier So obviously throughputs really important before they started their performance work The team pay attention to the five millisecond latency and throughput intersection the team measured and baseline at about a thousand Request per second is throughput for an instance They spent one release and managed to improve that all the way out to over three times the throughput Now that's good and that's impressive and it was amazing work But here's what's more important every single release they rerun the test and Look for continued incremental improvement to the scale now that is an incredibly mature open source project Now I love this image So those of you that might work in in the Cloud Foundry upstream you probably recognize it The the team was really looking forward to retiring the older DEA architecture They actually had a countdown timer of course This was a CF deployed application right and they had a countdown timer They counted down the minutes and seconds until we got to move the older architecture to the attic So make no mistake the DEA's are dead Well, they'll live on forever in read-only mode But the entire ecosystem has transitioned to the Diego architecture now Let's let's talk about Cloud Platform certification. You notice I've got your 2016 up there because in in December of 2015 we announced platform certification and we had a really lofty goal Our goal was to find a way to help ensure that the downstream distributions and services based on Cloud Foundry We're going to provide consistency So that we could have application and skill portability across the distributions and throughout the ecosystem now It's a bit of a lofty goal. We did not fully achieve it that year. We did launch the program and it was successful But fast forward to 2017 and we've done a few things so first The 2017 certification has eliminated the option for the older architecture where Diego only and the whole Ecosystems moved there To we've also decreased the age that A distribution that certified can use From something as old as a year back to less than six months. So now we're moving the entire ecosystem together Forward released by release The second thing we did though is to talk about application portability, you know The area of differentiation that the distros have is in the services along with a bunch of other wonderful things But you know the core platform is the same. It's really about the service capabilities So when we launched the open service broker API initiative That was designed to open up and free the services so that we could have a much more fluid service marketplace so their cloud provider a could offer their services to CF platforms that may or may not be running in their environment That's been successful and it's actually been successful across ecosystems And then of course as Abby mentioned we launched our Cloud Foundry certified developer program And that really was not possible without getting ecosystem consistency So we build off of this platform certification as a community and our training portfolio has grown dramatically We have been doing one-day summit training classes since the foundation started and I want to thank all of the the partner companies who have actually delivered that training and have created it And and cloud credo and pivotal specifically for open sourcing some of those courses for us But we also launched the introduction to Cloud Foundry class in the edX platform a team wonderful team from Stark and Wayne Worked really hard to get that done under a tight deadline We launched it and it's been a great success It sits there in in the edX platform right next to courses from MIT Stanford Harvard. It's a great audience to have Cloud Foundry for developers now This is the much more intense class is designed to be delivered really two ways one We're offering it in partnership with the Linux foundation as you learning material But two we have over 13 and growing authorized training partners that are ready to deliver this material It's common. It's multi-vendor It works across the distributions and it's a great baseline for all of the the different vendors in our ecosystem to build off And then of course last but not least the Cloud Foundry certified developers also Is also useful across the entire ecosystem Now I'm really happy to say that we had a soft launch that That program and we've already educated over 5,000 developers in less than three months without doing a ton of marketing. That's great, but it's just the start Okay, so let's transition now. I want to talk a little bit about innovation Now innovation Cloud Foundry comes from a number of different sources We of course have the Cloud Foundry community itself But we're deeply intertwined working with other open source ecosystems everything from the open container initiative with both Their image specification the RunSea library We've been actively working our Diego persistence project who's been finding ways to provide Attached storage to the containers have been working deeply with other Platforms to think about what does it mean to do volume management in a container system? Open tracing tracing is a very important CNCF project as well We can initiate Zipkin traces which is based in the open tracing API directly from a router all the way down through Microservices CNCF container networking interface, which I'm actually I'd like to make sure that everybody saw the announcement Our container-to-container networking project reached its 1.0 milestone Just a few days ago So if your distribution offers it give it a try if you're using the open source directly Give it a try if your district doesn't offer it feel free to ask them for it because it really is a great capability for the application developers Now Abby introduced that Microsoft has joined us I just want to spend a minute to talk about the Microsoft's technology and how we think about it related to Cloud Foundry so in 2015 We spent a lot of time talking about how the the Microsoft technology stack and dotnet in particular But also the windows operating system was really important right if you sort of squint You see that there's there's Roughly, you know when enterprise software is being built a large percentage of it is Java and another large percentage of it at net So the Microsoft technology stack is incredibly important to true enterprise adoption Now there was the iron foundry project, which was really the first effort And I think a few of those folks are here right years ago It's the first effort to do dotnet services on the windows operating system within the context of cloud foundry And we've evolved it. We have production systems that are running Network loads on Microsoft windows Now when Microsoft released the dotnet Language as open-source software that also allowed us to then say great. Let's have a dotnet core build pack for the Linux platform And that's available and that's that's being provided in the upstream at the same level of parity as all of the others But we also this year have unlocked the power of Bosch for the Windows platform The Bosch Windows project team has launched, you know, the initial release you could now get all the same operational value you get from managing Linux nodes Linux based distributed systems Using Windows based distributed systems And last thing I'll point out on Microsoft was I think Corey mentioned this very briefly yesterday The the CF command line tool and this is really neat the CF command line tool is now installed by default in the Azure cloud shell That makes it really easy for a developer using The Azure platform to get access to cloud foundry. They can I think one click deploy CF And then the command line is already installed in the cloud shell makes it really easy So so let's go back to this whole CF push thing I've actually heard from plenty of end users and in particular developers We do actually have some improvement that we need to make to this and The improvement is is in the flow of a developer now for those of you that write code, you know that there's there's a flow That you have local to your machine, you know You're local in your laptop You're doing a lot of tests and you know debugging and you're kind of you're looping you're looping and even though CF push is extremely easy and gets you all the value of the you know knowing that it's going to be well-operated That CF push process is a little bit slow for local development So Steven Levine our build packs project manager product manager He created on his own time a really neat project. So everybody should go check this out. It's called CF local CF local Uses the Docker container engine local to a laptop and it lets you do a stage That means build a container using a build pack It lets you run that container local and the really interesting thing here is that you can bind local database services To that instance so it looks and feels like it's running in the larger CF platform Or you can connect to a remote cloud foundry environment and proxy in the service instances that have been created for you You can also push and pull images. So a lot of possibility here, and I know he's got a really interesting Set of potential futures for this project. I encourage you to talk to him There's a there's an office hours that's dedicated to this particular project. So take the time go go learn about it It's got a great future for us Now completely orthogonal. Let's talk about something that isn't containers. There's a possibility Possibility that you know kernels might be an interesting alternative deployment model in the future There was a project that was created at Dell EMC called unique It's an orchestration platform for you know kernel based systems And it's been proposed to join the Cloud Foundry Foundation. So pay attention to that Engage in the conversation about whether it's a fit. We're excited that it's at least that community Which is already fairly diverse has expressed interest in joining us Okay, so I'm well over time with countdown clock is actually going up, but that's okay This is a lot of really interesting stuff at least to me So I want to say happy birthday to Bosch. Can we take a few minutes to sing happy birthday? No, no Don't really need to do that. But Bosch is five years old five years old And it's undergone an enormous amount of change in particular over the course of the last year It's gone through a set of changes that have been kind of termed a Bosch 2.0 Now we haven't released a Bosch 2.0, but they've been termed Bosch 2.0 because they've reduced the complexity of building Bosch releases they've reduced the complexity of deploying and managing environments using the Bosch platform so a lot of really great changes and That's why we believe the Kubo project which Abby introduced yesterday is so interesting because it's another demonstration of a complex distributed system a Platform focused on containers being managed by Bosch Right, so so what deploys your platform? That's a question. You should ask well. It turns out Bosch is the right answer for that But also Bosch is the multi-cloud story for Cloud Foundry make no mistake about it It's at the heart of it when we talk about multi-cloud and all the cloud provider interfaces that are supported by the upstream It's a wide variety We range from large-scale multi large-scale public clouds through to open-stores platforms like OpenStack The the on-premise software coming out of VMware with Photon and vSphere Don't forget of course Bluemix software and then even bare metal provisioning systems like Rack HD It's a wide range of options supported by the upstream community and in addition There are further CPIs that are out there for for other cloud providers or infrastructure options out in the open-source community but multi-cloud isn't just about CPIs it's actually It's about how do you ensure that the capabilities of these different public clouds are exposed in a way that can be used by developers and used by the platform So there's two other areas that I'll highlight The first is that the UA a module with its identity providers has added both Google and Microsoft's Identity providers. That's kind of me right so if you use Google apps in your enterprise you can tie that into your cloud platform The other is the open-service broker API now. I've mentioned this three times. This is the third time. There's a reason for that This is an important project It allows Microsoft it allows Google it allows Fujitsu To describe their cloud services in a way that can be consumed by other platforms Whether that's cloud foundry or whether that's Kubernetes or whether that's any of the Products that are building on top of Kubernetes or any other platform. It's extremely powerful Nice and simple, but extremely powerful And I have the pleasure actually announcing today that as of at some point really early this morning The the project team the cross ecosystem project team has their first release of the specification That's not intrinsically and directly tied to the cloud foundry platform release. So huge Hat tip to that that group. It's an amazing job And we're seeing it be adopted in the Kubernetes community and it's wonderful. It provides all kinds of flexibility for users So with that I'm done mostly talking to you and I actually want to introduce a few people up to the stage We're gonna we're gonna have a conversation for a few minutes here So I want to bring up first Frederick from TechCrunch who's gonna help moderate a conversation Areas all right Frederick and then we've got KY from Microsoft and Eric Johnson from Google Cloud