Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present this morning. And now let's get musically present by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you'll find inside your order of service. That concludes this morning's service. Welcome morning everybody and welcome what must feel like an eight o'clock service to some of you here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe nurturing environment and an early environment today to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg a proud sleep deprived member of this congregation and I'd like to extend a special welcome and a happy hello to anybody watching or listening at home but especially to those of you who might be guests, visitors, or newcomers. This is your first time here at First Unitarian Society. You'll find it's a special place and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings we offer a guided tour after the service. Just gather over here by the windows and we'll take care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other this is that wonderful time when we get to silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need for the next hour and while you're taking care of that important but simple task. Let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster and you think that young person might prefer to enjoy the service from a more private space we offer a couple options for you including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your companion can still hear and see the service. And shame on me if I would forget to mention the wonderful team of volunteers who make sure that the service runs smoothly today. Our appreciation to David Bryles on the sound system, Janine Nussbaum who greeted us upstairs as we arrive this morning, Tom Boykoff who is serving as our lay minister. Thank you Tom. Thank you to our ushers Bob and Paula Ault and Ann Kunen. The hospitality and coffee are hosted by Dorit Bergen and Nancy Kossoff and our tour guide after the service today is John Powell. Couple announcements for you, one relates to the annual campaign and everybody I know you've been waiting to find out who is the winner of our annual campaign gift basket it is Kirsten Sieber. Thanks Kirsten for pledging your support for FUS. You can pledge your support today or tomorrow or the day after by going to the website and or by picking up a pledge form in the commons right after the service. I submitted mine last week but I didn't win the gift basket. One more announcement and that is 68. 68 days until Cabaret. I know we keep changing the number on you but Friday May 20th is going to be a night in Italy and you don't have to leave the country to enjoy Italian food, Italian music and Unitarian auction items. We need a little bit of help from people who might be interested in sharing the energy and the magic of that evening and planning for it so if you're interested please see me or see contact Rhiannon at the staff and we will make sure that you have an opportunity to help lead Cabaret this year again 68 days May 20th a night in Italy. One more announcement and that is going to be from our friend James Morgan who'd like to tell us a little bit about Moses the Madison Chapter. James. Again I'm honored to be here amongst you all this morning and as Mr. Goldberg said this is indeed a special place with a lot of special people. My name is James Morgan I'm a member of the FUS Moses ministry team and we are fighting or working to fight mass incarceration in Wisconsin. Every year the Department of Corrections revokes or sends back to prison almost 4,000 former prisoners who are released upon condition of following rules of supervision. They are being revoked for not committing a new crime but because they broke one or more of their rules of supervision. Things like using a cell phone or a computer without permission for authorization, missing an appointment or failing a drug or alcohol test. Does breaking some of these rules mean that the person is now a threat to the safety of the public? Do we really need to lock people up for more years at a cost of $150 million per year? The impact of these decisions and human cost is devastating. Individual lives are destroyed. Families are torn apart and public safety is rarely approved. Our FUS Moses ministry team invites you to a presentation about the issue of the abuse of revocation in the Wisconsin prison system and that is this morning that is today. From 10 15 to 11 o'clock in the landmark auditorium coffee and refreshments will be served. We hope you will join us to learn more about the problem and how we can push for reform. Thank you. Thank you James. Thanks for providing that example of how collectively we're trying to make a difference in this world. With that I invite you to lean forward or sit back to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here.   Here you need not hide, you need not pretend to be anything other than who you are and who you are called to be. Come into this place where we can touch and be touched, heal and be healed, forgive and be forgiven. Come into this place where the ordinary is sanctified, life is glorified, compassion is realized. Come into this place because together all of us make it a holy place. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in your program. For every disappointment from which we have new growth, for every disillusionment after which we have a relighting of hope, from every disaster after which we have a resurrection into new life, we light this chalice and in the spirit of that new life please turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting. Please be seated and if there are any children who would like to join me in the front for the message for all ages. So is everybody as sleep deprived as Steve Goldberg this morning? Did you know that we actually lost an hour of sleep last night? Yes because what happened? You got to change your clocks. Yes you did because now it's daylight savings time so it's going to be light later at night and dark earlier in the morning. But today is also not only the beginning of daylight savings time it is March 13th and it is the birthday of a very famous Unitarian who was born almost 300 years ago and this Unitarian's name was yes it was light when you were falling asleep. My goodness you must have go to bed awfully early. Yeah but here's a story about a man named Joseph Priestley so I want you to listen to my story now. And Joseph Priestley was born in England which is a long way away it's all the way across the ocean and he became one of the most famous Unitarian ministers in the whole country of England. He's actually given credit for helping to spread the Unitarian church movement all through England. So he was a very highly respected man and he attracted some very important people to the congregation that he served including the grandparents of a very famous scientist the scientist by the name of Charles Darwin. Now Joseph Priestley's own reputation was based more on his own scientific discoveries than anything he wrote about Unitarianism. He was like Charles Darwin a scientist and he made some very important discoveries about how electricity works you know what turns our lights on and off and because of that work he became close friends with a very important American scientist named Benjamin Franklin. Anybody heard of Benjamin Franklin? Okay and besides that Joseph Priestley was widely known in this country and among his friends were two of our first presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson often talked in their letters about Joseph Priestley and what a what an amazingly intelligent guy he was and when Joseph Priestley got in trouble in politics late in his life and people in England didn't like him anymore Thomas Jefferson said Joseph you can come and you can live in the United States and so Joseph Priestley did come and began to live in the United States. Today he is best remembered not as a minister but as a scientist. Now when he was alive people didn't get paid for doing science for performing scientific experiments and so you know what 200 years ago many of the scientists in England were actually ministers and they got paid for being ministers but because ministers had lots of free time they were able to to do scientific experiments and you know and do the things that really interested them about science don't we wish that were true today. Now scientists are very curious people right how many wants anybody want to be a scientist. No okay you have to be really curious to be a scientist you got to you got to want to know how it is that the world works why things happen out there in the natural world like what makes the rainfall or how do fish breathe underwater you know questions like those. You know how fish breathe because they have gills that's right very good yeah they get that air out of the water don't they okay well one of the things about Joseph Priestley aspiring scientist yes I know now one of the things about Joseph Priestley one of the things about Joseph Priestley is that he could not go to the store to get the equipment that he needed to perform his experiments so he actually would make next slide his own equipment and this is an example of some of the things he made that he could use in his laboratory to find out things about the natural world now one of the things that really puzzled people that that really confused them had to do with why it was that if you were to do something like this candle what's happening to the flame it's going away you put a glass over the candle that goes away what would happen if I were to put a little creature in here like a mouse and put the top on it it would suffocate that's right it would die and people didn't know why that was you know why does that happen because when they thought about air all the air that's around us they just thought it was empty space they didn't realize that the air was actually made up of all was made up of all different kinds of things in other words people didn't know that the air that surround us is actually made up of what oxygen what's oxygen it's a gas right it's a gas that's right what else is in the air besides oxygen carbon dioxide and nitrogen and methane 70 percent of the air around us is actually not oxygen it is nitrogen now what joseph priestly discovered is he made this machine this this device that would measure the amount of air that was in a container like this and he discovered that when a mouse died or when a candle flame went out only 20 percent of the air was gone and that 20 percent was what oxygen that's right so he discovered that there was this strange gas in there is what kept mice alive and kept the candles burning and when you took it away that wouldn't happen anymore he did another experiment where he put a plant inside that glass what happened when he put the plant inside the plant created more oxygen so the mouse would stay alive inside that closed container so he discovered that well that must mean that these plants these green things they give off oxygen that will keep people alive and so he he discovered how these kind of gases affect us and and whether or not they will help to keep us alive but he made another experiment about gases that he said was the happiest experiment that he'd ever made and that experiment was one in which he was able to combine carbon dioxide with water to make what carbonated water which makes soft drinks possible so whenever your parents allow you to have on a special occasion a coke or a 7-up then you could remember to thank our old friend Joseph Priestley well Joseph Priestley spent his last few years as I said in the United States and he lived in a little town called Northumberland Pennsylvania and he continued to be a Unitarian minister here in the United States and there was this little chapel that was built and that he preached in until he died a few years later and so he helped advance Unitarianism in England and in the United States and he also helped to get people very interested in England and in this country in the whole science of chemistry so that's a little lesson about Joseph Priestley and I hope you remember him and thank him the next time you have a soft drink and so now we're going to sing you out with our next team thanks for being here thanks for getting up early oh nice please be seated good to see you kids with such an avid interest in science and so the reading that precedes the reflections today comes from the historian Frederick Turner the holidays that divide our calendar were meant to remind us of something important something we should not forget the word holiday after all means holy day religious holidays such as Passover and Easter they seek to transmute the memory of ancient suffering into the promise of better times at the center of the rituals in such holidays is sacrifice whereby we acknowledge by some smaller act of sacrifice or loss the greater gifts that enable us to exist at all but from time to time civilization demands the creation of a new holiday a holiday to celebrate a mystery or to call humanity to some new self-awareness and we need a new holiday today because we need to be reminded that the great works of humanity the very best that we have done and can do they entail a heavy cost not only to ourselves but to the world we inhabit as a species we cringe at the thought of the price that we pay to live in our civilization that we kill animals for food that we raise forests to provide shelter for ourselves that our cars and our factories darken the air both as a society and as individuals we are compelled to commit certain acts that make us ashamed after we have thought about them and shame which is nothing other than the discovery of self shame figures in the foundational myth of just about every culture on earth self-knowledge is humankind's most distinguishing attribute and our bodies inform us in a way that no other animal knows when we are caught in the ludicrous contradiction of our competing selves the blush the hot feeling around your neck and cheeks at the memory of something that you did last night or even 20 years ago and yet the hot flush of shame when recognized and accepted can serve as the prelude to a strange fresh moment of transformation and epiphany both as individuals and as a community but for this we require a holiday a ritual that enlarges the essential paradox of our humanity and so i propose the creation of a new festival to be observed on the first monday of august a month without a national holiday its name will be blushing monday and on this day we will recognize our destructive nature and celebrate our creativity and our lunacy the mood of the day will be shockingly mixed deadly serious comically manic cynical idealistic horrified joyful we will accuse ourselves forgive ourselves celebrate the absurd joy of mortal conscious life everyone has to dress and act in the most embarrassing way that he or she can imagine everyone must say the most embarrassing thing that comes into his head the thing that everybody thinks but nobody ever says you know either civilization is worth the cost or humanity is obliged to purge itself from the earth and because we have not chosen the latter option we owe it to the world to give thanks for its sacrifices favorite prayers and i'm happy to see that it was such music so thank you so much i recently finished reading a fascinating history of the vanderbilts at one time one of the wealthiest families in the world starting with virtually no assets no capital cornelius vanderbilt known as the comodore created this transportation empire in the decades following the civil war and the comodore's son william expanded his father's network of railroads and steamship routes and the vanderbilts social and economic influence helped define the gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th century subsequent generations of this family spent lavishly they built a half dozen mansions along new york's fifth avenue they established huge estates in north carolina new jersey and long island they commissioned the world's largest private yachts and they decorated their many homes with medieval tapestries and old masters and the vanderbilts entertained ceaselessly this this became their work this was a requirement of their lofty social station and it was a competitive contest that they engaged in with their equally wealthy peers now naturally only the right people were invited to their soirees european nobility powerful politicians and others like themselves who had more money than they knew what to do with in describing those who belonged to this privileged set a new york city reporter observed that its members devoted themselves to pleasure regardless of expense having read that comment a wealthy new york socialite corrected the journalist we devote ourselves to expense regardless of pleasure she sniffed an incident that took place place at florham florins vanderbilt toamley's 1200 acre new jersey estate reveals the ethos of america's privileged elite during this time period mrs vanderbilt had invited several dozen guests to spend the labor day weekend in her 110 room mansion emerging from breakfast after the weekend monday morning these visitors were surprised to find their bags all packed and awaiting their departure at the front door surely madam does not expect us to leave today one of the guests asked surely she knows that this is labor day a legal holiday and all businesses and offices are closed well the butler to whom these remarks were delivered bowed slightly and left to convey this concern to the lady of the house returning shortly he announced to the gathered guests begging your pardon mrs vanderbilt says to tell you that she has never heard of labor day this was of course an earlier era with the stock market crash of 1929 and the widespread pain caused by the great depression such posturing as hers came to be seen as callous and utterly inappropriate overt displays of wealth and privilege had become in fact at this time period a cause for shame but not so much today for we are living in what some observers have described as a new gilded age one in which the conspicuous display of wealth and the use of great substance to tilt the political playing field once again these have become common practice shortly after the recession of 2008 hundreds of millions of dollars were withdrawn from the nation's treasury to bail out some of the nation's largest financial institutions including the prime insticators of the mortgage meltdown out of those taxpayer funds the top executives of these same firms claimed huge bonuses feathering their own nests at the expense of the recently foreclosed now jennifer jackett teaches environmental studies at new york university and she argues that shame shame can be an extra legal weapon in the fight against this kind of corporate greed and malfeasance even if no specific legal statute has been violated egregious instances of exploitation and influence peddling can be called out and so jackett would target repeat offenders who seem to have scant regard for the public's well-being or for the health of the environment she says if shaming can benefit the community why not use it in ways that the community finds acceptable that shaming can provide a powerful incentive to modify behavior is attested by california's example when the state threatened to publish the names of its tax of its leading tax delinquents on a website before california could carry out that threat they had received more than 400 million dollars in back taxes the communist witch hunts that shook the nation in the early 1950s afford another example during those years wisconsin's senator joe mccarthy gained a nationwide reputation by lodging largely baseless accusations against functionaries in the state department the pentagon and other government agencies and for a time joe mccarthy was the most feared man in washington but as we know he carried his crusade a bit too far and so at a nationally televised senate hearing on june 9th 1954 an army defense attorney by the name of joseph nye welch famously rebuked the inquisitor saying have you no decency sir at long last have you left no sense of decency this episode succeeded in drawing a curtain of shame around wisconsin's junior senator and he left those hearings disgraced and with greatly diminished power and with his departure a dark page in american politics turned over examples like these highlight the difference between a society in which shame can serve a constructive social purpose and where it cannot the vanderbelts lived during an era in which the very wealthy lived lavishly and shamelessly often paying their employees less than a living wage eventually and in keeping with changing social and cultural norms behaviors that once excited public adulation became a source of resentment and disapproval and sure enough the wealthy learned to live less ostentatiously and similarly joe mccarthy played to the public's fear of the soviet union and initially he enjoyed widespread support for his anti-communism efforts but eventually eventually those fears dissipated and mccarthy came to be seen more as a persecutor than a savior public shaming hastened that man's downfall but what about today is shame still part of the national conversation and does it deter public figures from acting inappropriately or in ways that defend public standards and our democratic values not so much corporate leaders of stupendous wealth receive tax breaks and subsidies worth billions of dollars while at the same time promoting policies that push middle and low income americans even lower on the economic ladder one is tempted to ask the members of this plutocracy have you no decency sir have you at last no sense of decency and when it comes to shamelessness what are we to make of donald trump whose scurrilous attacks on entire categories of human beings have become red meat for a large segment of disaffected americans mr trump for whom shamelessness seems to have become a criterion of strong leadership has even lately been inciting his followers to physical violence so does contemporary society require a renewed sense of shame robert caron a psychotherapist who practices and teaches in new york city says that compared to some other cultures he knows we tend to give shame rather short shrift people hear are strange about shame caron's asian students tell him amity etzioni well-known spokesman for communitarianism has called for a revival of shame he says it can be an effective means of altering behavior promoting the common good and so he suggests that we should publish the names of men who solicit prostitutes we should place identifying labels on license plates for those who have been convicted of dwi we should require serious troublemakers to wear special clothing like any tool etzioni says shame can be abused but that does not make it wrong in principle but if it's not wrong in principle it is quite often wrong in practice and whatever benefits it might confer we are probably right to be suspicious of this powerful potentially disabling emotion so let's let's step back for just a moment and ask what is it we're talking about here what is shame how is it triggered and what are we going to do about it well we can begin by drawing a necessary distinction between shame and guilt because these two terms are often used interchangeably but they're not at all the same according to robert bligh we experience guilt when we have done something wrong realize we have done something wrong and recognize that we have to atone for it shame on the other hand is the conviction often unwarranted that as a person you are an utterly inadequate being on this planet barbara flannigan agrees saying that guilt guilt is this internal reaction to a moral transgression it is linked to doing something wrong and it presumes personal agency responsibility shame flannigan says lacks this moral dimension it is the experience she says of feeling bad about oneself but not for having transgressed a person experiences shame not for what he or she does but for what he or she is one's very identity as a worthy person is called into question and exposed for everybody else to see so unlike jennifer jiquette and amity atcyoni houston universities brunet brown has some very serious reservations about the utility of shame it is often she says the cause of destructive behaviors and if it once served a beneficent social purpose it no longer does she argues according to brown a person's negative behaviors can very often be traced right back to unacknowledged shame it is she said highly correlated with conditions like addiction depression violence and aggression so when we think again of those fervent supporters of donald trump this kind of rings true because surveys indicate that many of trump's followers have lost significant economic and social ground in recent years this is the same demographic that now leads the country in the rate of suicide and substance abuse feeling inadequate feeling ashamed of their own ability to capture the american dream these are folks who need a scapegoat a person can respond to the shame they feel in several ways brunet brown suggests you can move away from it which means stuffing it down keeping it a deep dark secret you can move toward it which may involve ingratiating yourself to others becoming an overcompensating people pleaser or you can move against shame by attacking those who are thought to be responsible shaming and hurting them in turn this is the message mr trump seems to be delivering when he promises to make america great again to make you great again the subtext here is only i donald trump can remove the shame that you feel living with active conscious shame can be very distressing especially when one doesn't quite know what to do with it how to dispel it if we fess up to a moral transgression and a tone for it then we can assuage our guilty consciences but since shame has to do with one's identity and not with any particular wrongdoing what can we do except just disappear think of the expressions that we use when we are ambushed by shame i could crawl into a hole i could sink into the floor i could just die and in this age this age of the social media and the internet this is important to keep in mind because there have been too many stories of impressionable teens and young adults who were driven to suicide or perhaps less often to acts of violence because embarrassing information about them was circulated online exposed to the whole world these young people no longer knew how to live with themselves they were afraid to show their faces in public because once you have been shamed on the internet laura kipnis writes you are shamed for life despite these various services that claim to be able to scrub the search engines of victims names now is it possible to immunize people from shame to a certain extent yes and the formative years are so very very important children who are raised by parents and who are exposed to teachers who help them to feel secure in themselves are better equipped to deal with guilt and shame as adults it is so much easier to shame a person when he or she already possesses from childhood a sense of their own unworthiness francis weller is a psychotherapist she recalls or he recalls one morning when his young son bursting with enthusiasm runs into the kitchen yelling daddy daddy and he was startled and he was making breakfast and francis weller snapped at his son stop that quit that which caused his young son to retreat in tears to his room weller knew immediately that he had acted inappropriately and so he went to his child's room to apologize you wanted something from me i didn't give it to you right his son responded i didn't think that you wanted to be my daddy anymore that's how fast the rupture can occur weller says and afterwards i thought to myself what would have happened if i had not gone to my child's room somehow he would have been left with that thought that i did not want to be his father and worse than that that it was his fault humiliation alice miller notes was once a commonly used pedagogical strategy that teachers employed to undermine and to erase what they called a child's self-conceit this humiliation this shaming is still employed perhaps not as rigorously as a classroom management tool surveys have revealed that 85 percent of adults today can recall one or more painful incidents in their childhood and 90 percent of them can trace this humiliating instance to a specific teacher administrator coach or loved one much of the shaming is not meant to hurt children brunet brown acknowledges but we need to talk about alternatives to using it now there are antidotes available to us who have reached adulthood and brunet brown suggests something that she calls rumbling rumbling the employment of mindfulness in pursuit of greater insight into the causes of our shame she says that those people who are troubled by shame tend to ruminate a lot they turn over these negative thoughts and sensations without ever reaching closure but rumbling is different from ruminating its purpose she says is to find the truth of the story what is it that i need to understand about myself what is the fictional part of the narrative that i'm telling myself and where is that coming from and what we do this kind of internal processing we may discover with robert caron that not all shame is the same so there is for different for example class shame the shame that adheres to skin color social class sexual orientation disability this is the divisive kind of shame used to stigmatize an entire class of individuals and it is all too visible today in our political discussions but then there is narcissistic shame which leaves its possessor feeling unlovable and wholly inadequate burdened with this curse as ineradicable as original sin narcissistic shame and class-based shame both are toxic and neither performs a useful service either to the individual or to society but then in his typology robert caron includes something called existential shame which he says arises when you see yourself as you really are and then use that knowledge to begin a process of rehabilitation and so writing in the new york times recently sally satel and scott lilean felt argue that this existential shame can assist addicts in their recovery if those addicts retain some measure of confidence that their habit is within their control if on the other hand that same addict that individual believes that their addiction is a disease over which they have no volitional power then that shame can become narcissistic this indelible stain that can potentially become a cause for even deeper despair so whether or not shame possesses redeeming value well i think that the jury is still out some of those who i have read insist that it is an emotion shame's an emotion just like any other like guilt it has the potential to play a useful role under certain circumstances shame jennifer jiquette says is a norm enforcer and where it's gotten a bad rap it's because the norm being enforced is a bad one just because shame is uncomfortable doesn't mean it should be banished others others look forward to the eventual disappearance of shame they celebrate the de-shaming of sex and a decline in the shaming power of institutional religion there are better and more humane ways of altering people's behavior and maintaining a just society than by using this blunt instrument of shame they maintain now personally i think that as human beings you know we're kind of stuck with it and that being the case i think we would all do well to learn a little more about shame and how it has affected us learn more about its potency and if necessary to employ it very very judiciously sparingly always within the spirit of justice and gracious goodwill may it be so amen and our outreach offering today will benefit the league of women's voters who are assisting many people to register to vote in advance of the upcoming elections and i believe that if you have not registered or if you have changed addresses and need to re-register you could actually do so in the commons today at the table that is being staffed by our league of women voters volunteers please be generous this is a time when we do share joys sorrows and concerns that have been registered by our members in our cares of the congregation book which sits right outside the middle doors uh every sunday except that sunday when we have joys and sorrows which you can share personally from the front of this auditorium that usually happens on the last sunday of the month and this morning there was one notation here we are informed that longtime f us member sally hanson had died this past week and her name was included in this morning's obituaries sally hanson was a very active member of the society and for a number of years now she had been suffering from severe dementia for many years she lived at home and her husband lee hanson was an absolutely dedicated caregiver and and very very devoted to sally so we will miss her and we wish lee and the family well on this painful grief journey and so now i would invite you to turn to our closing hymn number 323 break not the circle please be seated for the benediction and the postlude and so now with gladness for our achievements and with forgiveness for our all too frequent mistakes and misapprehensions and with perseverance in life's adventure we push on onward with respect to our yesterday's onward with praise for today onward with hopefulness for tomorrow blessed be and amen


Thank you for having me here today Every day Netflix offers highly curated and highly produced content to over 100 million customers around the world Stranger things is one of them. I haven't seen the second season, but I highly recommend it. I heard very good things about it so My job at Netflix is to make sure as you said that When customers come to our service They just get what they want. All they want to do is search or find the content that they want to see and Watch it So our goal is to have over a 100 million happy customers But the truth is that we run a relatively complex distributed system and Sometimes something goes wrong And then our customers are not as happy as you may have hoped When you have over a hundred million customers and when something goes wrong in your service Usually not only one customer is affected or even 25 or even 100 Usually many many more are affected and this is something that we think about a lot and one of the things we think about is If you think about what happens when when we have an incident Very very quickly the customers that are affected become faceless There are only 900 pictures on this image and on the slide But oftentimes when we have an incident it can affect it can it doesn't always but it can affect even millions of people so Let me give you a little bit of more context on my work as We said we have more than 100 million customers around the world Together they watch more than 125 million hours of content every day So if you put those two numbers together you will see that if one of my services fails You can affect a lot of people relatively quickly So time is of the essence and as we'll go through this presentation. This will become clear how we think about this Today we have about 380 micro services in production I say about because that changes sometimes It is also the case that some of the services that we run Really don't deserve a name that has micro in it because they're really gigantic But we have that's that's about the scale that we're looking at and Netflix also runs on over 1,000 device types so that ranges from You know your mobile phones even older kinds of devices To set top boxes and to your TV at home to your smart TV All of these we support so over a thousand device types and We do all of this with less than 10 core SREs So you may think that we're a little bit crazy and that may well be true But let me tell you a little bit about how we accomplish this one of the ways that we accomplish this is By having a very strong DevOps culture, which is not the topic of this talk, but I'm happy to tell you all about Offline Essentially every team is responsible for the own services that they run and then the central core SRE team is responsible for the overall reliability of the service This picture gives you a more a better visualization of our distributed service Now these are the 380 roughly services that I mentioned earlier now note that these are only the services that are what we call on the Streaming path and that means when you come to Netflix Everything that you need in order to actually be able to watch a movie Normally you don't need all of them in order to be able to watch your movie But those every circle here represents a service that is responsible for something that you may do on the service search recommendations localized descriptions and so forth So what you see over here is you see traffic coming in from the internet from the left and going through our various gateways so that we have a gateway that routes traffic and The gateway routes traffic to our various front ends the biggest of which you can think of is the the dot here in the middle Which is our API what we call our API and the API? To give you a sense talks directly to about 70 services downstream from it And then of course indirectly to several hundred as we've as we've talked so if you think about the system and our central team being responsible for this What I see is That insights are everything you need to automate The heck out of this thing you need to make sure that whatever you can get automatically you get it is not feasible that one person Understands everything that goes on inside of the system So how do we get insights? We have various tools in our toolbox, but one of our most critical ones is Mantis Mantis is a cloud native stream processing service built on top of Mesos The way Mantis works is that we Instrument a lot of the microservices that you saw in the previous slide not all of them but many of the very critical ones and we Give them the ability to emit metrics to Mantis We also gather we also have the ability to get gather metrics from various other data sources such as Kafka and Amazon s3 and various others and So then the data flows through Mantis and the way this works is that internal? Users so Netflix developers can write Mantis jobs Mantis Like I said, it's built on top of Mesos. It's a Mesos framework that we've developed and then our our Netflix developers create Mantis jobs that can aggregate data that can filter data that can perform Operations on that data and do various other things that eventually lead to such things as alerts operational dashboards anomaly detection So the way to think about this is our microservices and these other data sources emit operational metrics that give you insights about service health and those metrics are processed automatically with Mantis jobs and then lead to alerts operational dashboards and so forth and they do all of that in real time and Again, that is very critical because we have we can have a lot of users affected very very quickly when something goes wrong Let's take a little bit of a look under the hood As I've mentioned Mantis is is a Mesos framework and In order for it to satisfy our own needs our own Netflix needs We developed our own schedule or called Fenso, which is open source Fenso is Optimized for cloud it is very important for us because all of our our entire Streaming Infrastructure and all of our mantis jobs and everything else that we run runs on top of AWS In this case EC2 So what does it mean for Fenso to be optimized for cloud? One of the things that allows us to do is it allows us to scale the underlying agent cluster All the scaling is very important to us and we'll see that a little bit later on But the amount of data that gets pushed through Mantis jobs Various greatly over the course of the day and the course of the week So as our resource needs change we also need to scale the underlying clusters Fenso is also designed to allow us to have to satisfy various other constraints that we have many of which are you know Pertain to the cloud some of which that don't so for instance we can do being been packing task affinity And one of the other things that has to do with you know the way we have our cloud set up is spreading tasks across EC2 Availability zones so that you can accomplish high availability, which obviously is quite important for us Let's talk a little bit about how we use Mantis and what we use Mantis for Internally at Netflix One of the things that we do with Mantis is something called real-time SPS SPS stands for stream starts per second So essentially this is a metric of how often people are able to come to Netflix click play and actually are successfully able to watch So it works This is our one of our most important top-level metrics that we use to determine system health So if SPS Hits a wall and drops we know something is going wrong So real-time SPS, which is powered by Mantis allows us to get insights in real time Into whether SPS is in line with our expectations or not So what you see here generally are two lines And the black line is essentially the expectation that we have of what will happen Which is based on historical data and various algorithms that we have and the blue line is the actual observed SPS So sometimes they're a little bit off I didn't show the numbers here because I cannot but the scale obviously matters here But it gives you an idea of how closely aligned we are with expectations Real-time SPS Let's us know that something is wrong if something is wrong that something is wrong in seconds not minutes We have various other ways in which we can determine whether something is wrong with SPS or our overall system health but real-time SPS really lets us know within seconds sometimes and That can make the difference between you know 900 and 9 million users being affected. So this is something that's pretty critical to us Real-time SPS in our case and for many of our metrics, this is the case We are able to break it down by a region This is important because many of the incidents that we have these days are isolated to one region We run in multiple regions on top of AWS and the way we generally roll out our software ensures that when incidents do happen they happen generally only in one region which is great because then we have several Mitigation techniques that we can apply for instance shifting traffic from one region to another which we do frequently We just did last night And hopefully nobody noticed So breakdown by region is important and then breakdown by device type is also important So SPS real-time SPS and our other metrics are generally broken down by device type Which allows us to narrow in very quickly on which device or devices are affected That is important because as I mentioned we have a very strong DevOps culture. We have subject matter matter experts that are You know in the know and responsible for specific parts of our system and that also Applies to specific device types. So if we have an issue for instance that only affects say TVs Then we know whom to call for help We don't only use mantis for SPS as I've alluded to we use it for a variety of different metrics again The idea is the same teams can set up individual Dashboards and alerts and other kinds of analyses for all kinds of different metrics that We gather So for instance here what you see is I had to black out the specific paths But what you can do here is the API team set up a Dashboard that shows Elevated five hundred for specific paths and the specific paths or endpoints are Specific to specific devices. So again that lets you if you have now elevated 500 Error codes coming from a specific endpoint, then you know That gives you clues as to what might have happened if something does go wrong As I mentioned before auto scaling is really important to us And that's one of the reasons that we developed Fenso we run on top of easy to and we scale the cluster Day in and day out all the time That goes for our services that are on the streaming path as well as for the mantis jobs that we run for analysis and insights As you can see here Roughly 18 million messages flow through mantis jobs at peak where it's only about six million flow through mantis During trough and if you think about it, why is that? This is because you know usage of our actual service very scatly over the course of the day You know people don't want tend to watch a lot of Netflix while they're sleeping But they do tend to watch Netflix While they're at home in the evening and not so much while they're at work So you see this you know the cyclical nature of our of our the usage of our service and the usage or the number of messages that flow through mantis Excuse me mirrors that over the course of the day So as we as we go we we have to scale the cluster so we can make better use of our resources But we don't stop there We do something that I call streaming on demand and the way this works is that We allow users again, that's internal Netflix developers to set up ad hoc queries That allow them to stream data only when it's needed for operational insights The way this works is that you as the developer you can set up a query say that pertains to a specific status code or path and Only then that data is streamed from our say API service or one of the other microservices that we run on the streaming path That data is then streamed and analyzed by mantis and you can get real-time insights and real-time information on On that service only when you need it and Again, that is important because we have so much data that we would otherwise have to push through the system That it's actually just not really feasible So with this we actually greatly reduced the amount of data that does need to get streamed through our system While at the same time allowing for the same kind of flexibility and the ability to have those insights So when you define one of these ad hoc queries a mantis job gets created under the hood and started on one of our agents Hosts Again autoscaling comes into the picture here. So this doesn't follow exactly the same Ciclic nature as we saw for the number of messages But what you see here is essentially how many jobs get set up on top of mantis over the course of a day So essentially when people are at work and they're debugging and they're trying different things Or different smaller things can up come up that they want to chase down. They set up mantis jobs To to dig into before performance and behavior of our service What does that all mean? Let's bring it back. I I think it's important that we sometimes take a step back and think about The infrastructure work that we do or the work that feels like it's very deep down in the stack and take a step back And think about how it actually affects real users In my case what mantis means for us is Faster detection of issues so we know of issues in seconds rather than minutes Which somebody sitting in? I don't know India in their living room trying to watch watch Netflix. It may really affect them We have faster insights into the causes of those incidents. So not only do we understand something is wrong because of mantis We can actually get faster insights into specifically what happened and what went wrong and Again, we have a faster path to mitigation So we can if we know what's going on or if we know for instance, which region is affected We can very quickly take steps to mitigate the issue So if only one region is affected again We can just shift traffic away from that region and nobody no users will ever know that anything bad when happened in the first place hopefully and This is what we really care about at the end of the day all of us right and we care about Making sure that our customers are happy and that they get the service that they actually signed up for If you want to contact me here's my contact information I'll be around for questions if any of you have any thank you


When the narcissist realises they have lost you. You may have been the narcissist's grade A source of supply But before the narcissist even got involved with you They saw you as something temporary Because they know that every supply has an expiry date So there's no such thing as a real relationship with a narcissist It's a transaction Because it's undefined and uncommitted It's based on convenience and short-term circumstances But they act like you're going to be there forever They love bomb you.   This is how they were raised to be But when they realize they have lost you It is a very difficult experience for them So they will be stalking and harassing you They will get their flying monkeys involved They will send you gifts.  It's very important to them You may see these orchestrations Of their new supply on their social media But that's just to conceal their misery and pain. They will flaunt their new supply They will share boastful statements and displays But they're just lying to themselves They know they're not happy That's why they need so many people, money and possessions to cover it up But it will never be enough for them Because they lost you They lost a real one They lost a person who wouldn't have tuned on them A person who always had their back no matter what So how can they be happy?  They're just using it to distract themselves They're using it to get other people to validate their false narrative To make it more believable for themselves So that they can further detach from reality And exist in this fantasy world where everything is just fine and dandy But it's just an act It's just an illusion They're still going through it While they were with you They may have acted like they didn't see it But they felt your kindness They felt your love and passion And now they've lost that So how can they be okay?


Pollination, pollination is the transfer of pollen from a male part of a plant to a female part of a plant, enabling later afterlization and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents are animals such as insects, birds, and bats, water, wind, and even plants themselves. When self-pollination occurs within a closed flower, pollination often occurs within a species. When pollination occurs between species it can produce hybrid offspring in nature and in plant breeding work. In angiosperms, after the pollen grain has landed on the stigma, it develops a pollen tube which grows down the style until it reaches an ovary. Sperm cells from the pollen grain then move along the pollen tube, enter an ovum cell through the micro pile and fertilize it, resulting in the production of a seed.  It's to gametes travel down the tube to where the gametified S containing the female gametes are held within the carpal. One nucleus fuses with the polar bodies to produce the endosperm tissues, and the other with the ovule to produce the embryo hence the term double fertilization. In gemnisperms, the ovule is not contained in a carpal, but exposed on the surface of a dedicated support organ, such as the scale of a cone, so that the penetration of carpal tissue is unnecessary. Details of the process vary according to the division of gemnisperms in question. To main modes of fertilization are found in gemnisperms. Psycads and ginko have modal sperm that swim directly to the egg inside the ovule, whereas conifers and natophytes have sperm that are unable to swim but are conveyed to the egg along the pollen tube. The study of pollination brings together many disciplines, such as body, horticulture, entomology, and ecology. The pollination process as an interaction between flower and pollen vector was first addressed in the 18th century by Christian Conrad Sprengel. It is important in horticulture and agriculture, because fruiting is dependent on fertilization, the result of pollination. The study of pollination by insects is known as antichology.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late in sports guards. We are doing the 22 Panini gold standard and elements mixer number Did I not drop link? Oh, I did Hobby six box mixer number 13 random team style. Here's a look again at your random results As always you can find these on the website under the results tab as well as the link in chat. Let's do it guys Oh, it fills one. That's right. Jeremy. Are you a filly of uh, uh, philadelphia fan? I'm assuming I'll start with elements. We'll do gold standard last Matthew Stafford to 199 and a pierce strong jr. Xenon 20 out of 54. There you go. Six Got uh eight out of 27. That is uh, kuper cup There you go rams Rams on the combo spot there, I believe Yep adam v got uh, there's 21 out of 50 john mechie the third on the rookie star rookie neon signs for the texans There you go, houston And we've got nice one here going to the raiders how we long 16 out of 27 on the steel signatures vet There you go Raiders I'm three and three. I just lost a shawm this week You're so lucky to Dude, I had no Derek Henry No, I'm on raw saint frown that I had all my guys were injured So I couldn't even start. I had to start james cook Dude, I didn't even know I was playing you so now it makes even better. How's that taste?  I want to lose to you. Okay. No reason.  I'm out here losing to the bottom dwellers. That's what's happening here I'm losing to the bottom dwellers. We've got alvin kamara I whooped them jamal at okay one by like eight points. That's a whooping jamal adams 90 out of 95 We've got uh, this is 10 out of 10 tray mcbride. That's a nasty patch for the cardinals There you go, chris s on the cardinals three colored patch It's too easy, man 99 out of 99 eric azucanma There you go, there you go and we've got bob lily 57 or 97 out of 99 going to the cowboys Okay says the red socks fan The red socks are the bottom dwellers We just got a dub The red socks? No, I just got a dub The easiest dub I had on this whole season I was like man, look at this You stink, Sean. I sat on my good players.  I'm playing a pop-a-pop lord Good lord Uh, I believe we got points coming up here I'm just gonna Do that really quick The guy that's up Rory Got nazi harris tungsten 53 out of 74 and a xenon cd lamp That's for 47 out of 54. You're the owner of one Got the bonte adams going to the uh raiders. That's 62 out of 199 That's the past vaughn. We're talking about the present and right now presently you guys are bottom dwellers Ooh, nice one here. Go to the titans Nathan g malik willis 20 out of 99 The rookiest, uh steel signatures. There you go. All right. Now we're on two gold standard Vaughn, let's go astros Empty You can't say those words Got mike evans. That's 20 out of 49 Got jameson williams rookie. That is one out of 75 Got marquise brown. I think that's the first time i've seen marquise brown come out of this Do we have more points again? Going to the uh cardinals. I believe we do. Yes, we do. We got 400 points Let's go vaughn. Right until all at the end. Let's go. Oh my god White gold 97 out of 299. That's going to be antonio gibson We've got justin herbert on the gold gear 230 out of 299 going to the chargers And we've got nice one here.  Well, the red sox cheated too So I under it makes sense that you guys are both rooting for the astros like rooting for rooting for teams that also cheated That's why core got fired or core got suspended Oh, yeah No, it's understandable about why you guys would why why you would root for the astros in that sense. Yeah. No, it makes sense No understandable 9 out of 99 22 out of 25 and that was bryan rovinson jr. This is uh, i say a likely let's go. There you go rames We've got cd lamb. That is 141 out of 299 straws for life So done with this guy. So done with this guy. Monro st. Brown on the white gold 171 out of 299 going to the uh, lions I did I do Now there are 400 points. Sorry guys. Apologize on that one random to all at the end gold plated justin herbert 286 out of 299 Hey six There we go. We got a baili zappy 42 out of 149 on the rpa Congrats six There you go, buddy. That's just his cleat down there. That's not like a uh a damage or anything.  Congrats, buddy. That's what we like to see nice baili zappy Hey 27 carl 27 Probably not six just because it's uh, it's a uh, it's just like a base Got christian watson. That is 10 out of 75 Got lemar jackson 44 out of 99. Yeah, I know kirk. It's it's oxin.  That is brett farf 158 out of 199 Is it all right, uh, we'll mag the zappy then did not know it was over 200. I apologize six No, we'll just throw it in Throw it in a mag justin ross that is 42 out of 199. I didn't realize they were still going for that much Nice one there and to finish it off. We've got nice dany gray 9 out of 49 going to the niners There you go. San friend that'll do it for the break guys still a quick, uh Random really uh right here. We've got how much is this 600 400 and 400. So let me get the random going really quick Sorry about so many points guys. I do apologize. Yeah zappy prices are pretty crazy So, yeah, just make sure to mag that belly zappy would be a chance too. Um, all right cool All right, gonna do the random really quick here Uh, let me take you guys over gonna roll the dice. Uh, so basically after Six times the team on top will get uh 600 and then the team after the second and third team will get 400 each So here we go six times one two three four five and six Uh jags Uh, I got one here Jags got 600 that's I think 400 the grand 600 by the way. Yeah, you just switch them. Uh jags got uh 600 uh 400 is going to be the chargers and texans Cool. All right, let's do a quick recap guys Bring these over got bret far of packers George Kittle Niners, that's uh darnel mooney for the bears Uh, Justin Herbert chargers Amon Ross st. Brown is uh, lions CD lamb for the Cowboys that's Justin Herbert chargers Antonio Gibson for the Commanders marquise brown cardinals davante Adams raiders tray Mcbride. That's kind of nasty to time cardinals And cooper cup for the rams. We've got our autos now Got Justin Ross for the cheats, uh, dany gray Niners, uh, sauce gardener jets Mleek Willis going to the um titans We're gonna mag the willis as well erica zucanma going to the uh, dolphins Bob lily cowboys, that's howie long for the rapes, uh, john mechie the third going to the texans And for six how about a bailey zappy 42 out of 149 rpa? There you go six congrats man hit pretty well with the uh, um Whatever they're called the patriots there, uh, thanks again for the fill everyone next up. We've got a full case of gold standard I believe


I lost my mind on the Gary Rosenton one I saw a month ago in Cleveland and I said it over to you Yeah, but this one is way more crazy here But I I'm sure you've told the story a bunch, but how did you get this guitar? Well, you know, it was really crazy because it really feels like this guitar came to me I've been in London a couple of days when I got a phone call from a friend of mine Is it a guitar dealer and he said I have a guitar for you to check out. I said, okay What's the guitar? I said greeny and I said, bro I'm not I'm not interested in a guitar with a price tag of two million dollars and he said nah It's all poppycock. It's not two million dollars. It's not what it's not even one million dollars, you know That's all rumor. I was like, hmm, okay Maybe you should bring it over Wow, and he brought it up to my hotel room with an amazing amp, which didn't help There's a old box that 30 Sounded incredible. I had these ghost notes where you're you're like hearing other notes other than what you're playing You know that happens with the like old vintage stuff and Dean I had that guitar in my hand for like Maybe a minute and a half and I just knew bro. I just friggin knew I wasn't gonna give it back Yeah, I was not going to give it back Yeah, and what blew me away was okay I plug it in and I hit a chord, you know on the on the bridge pick up I'm like yeah nice and clear and you know the cuts and then switch to the neck pick up and Start playing some lead stuff. I'm like going. Oh my god, man Super super syrupy creamy tone and then I put it in the middle and that this is what makes this guitar so unusual the fact that the the neck pickup is Turned around so the screws are facing towards the middle rather than towards the neck Because it's like that it creates an out-of-phase sound. Yeah, that sounds like a Strat through a hundred watt Marshall It's insane and I could not believe it could not believe that sound that thought that's not supposed to happen man You know a less ball all of a sudden turning into a strata the flick of a switch, right? And it was it was amazing and I hadn't even like come into consideration the fact of who owned it Oh, yeah, who is who's played it? I was just blown away by the fact that it was just a super super musical Incredibly totally gifted piece of wood man unbelievable. There's you know There's a term for that for a four letter word and it's called mojo. Hey, yeah, Mojo That's a connected to this piece of wood. It's just out of control


Have you ever wondered how someone in a group is passionate, can easily take control of a situation and expresses a clear vision of the group's goals? How that person makes the whole group feel motivated, enthusiastic and recharged? That person is showing leadership traits. An effective leadership strategy distinguishes a company that thrives and one that fails. Now the business world is getting increasingly complex and fast paced. Evolving social and political landscape, high tech development and hybrid working models have made the job quite difficult for leaders. Now to succeed in a swiftly changing work environment, you need more than basic leadership skills. Welcome to Business Insights and Plus TV Africa, I am Justin Akadonian. Alright, first off the House of Representatives has proposed a six-month extension to stop the collection of old Naira notes and for the redesigned Naira to finally come fully on-stream. Now the House also set up a special committee to interface with CEOs of commercial banks to discuss challenges facing hindering the small take-off of the new CBN policy. Well let's take that report. There are controversies surrounding the introduction of the new Naira note from the inception and has continued to launch the new policy. Following a motion on urgent public national importance brought by Honorable Sada Suli, Nigerians are facing challenges in swapping the new Naira notes from commercial banks across the country. The lawmaker thereby called for the extension of the time frame while advising that the insistence by CBN for 31 January 2023 could further ruin the nation's hailing economy. I'm not being personal, the CBN is a good policy, it's in tandem with global best practices but what over, the currencies are not forced out of circulation, they are phased out of circulation. In this instance, in my own view, our currencies is being forced out of circulation and it is a known fact. The cashless policy and the currency swap of the new Naira notes have raised a lot of concerns to the growth of our economy. Mr Speaker, there is need, the bulk Nigerian economy is driven by SME and petty traders therefore there is need for some review of the policy since transition is required and this transition does not only involve CBN. The motion was supported by lawmakers who bemoaned the hardship faced by their various constituencies in swapping for the new notes. And we are all aware in the village, people do trading with 200 Naira, 100 Naira, 50 Naira, so if you give somebody 1000 Naira, he can go and buy something but there is no way he can get change because the only available currency is the old note of 100 Naira, 50 Naira, 200 Naira, 500 Naira. This is one thing. Another thing, we are all aware, even before the insurgency, not east is the poor of the poorest of the whole zones in the country and our poverty was further escalated by Boko Haram insurgents and other related insecurity and today we have something that is almost worse than Boko Haram. From the first amendment, because of the reasons CBN are used to, I would say that rather than one year, we will use it to six months, that's my first amendment. Let's move it back to six months, that we should gradually phase out in six months. Let's not take it to one year. The second amendment is to add what you just said, we must meet with the bank mds today, tomorrow because of the debt line they put in, they have two amendments. In his view, the speaker called for the review of the new currency policy to six months while also calling for an interface between the house and the CEOs of commercial banks to trash out challenges facing the new policy. So we'll set up an adult committee under the leadership of the house leader to meet with the operators tomorrow and then subsequently with CBN. In his ruling on the motion, the speaker mandated the house bankers committee which will be headed by the house leader Honorable Al-Hassan Adodogua to interface with the CEOs of the commercial banks and report back for further legislative action. Welcome back. Amongst other styles of leadership, transformational leadership has gained immense popularity. These styles can help bring positive changes in attitude, thinking and approach. Assam Oye is a world acclaimed leader with a passion to emerge, develop and deploy leaders' potentials in different spheres of influence. He is a president of springtime leadership academy and lead pastor of transforming church with a badge premium prize as one of the Nigeria's most watched online personality. Oye is a multi-dynamic and international speaker with over 5,000 leaders raised across Europe, Africa and America. He now joins us now to discuss more on the topic. All right, many thanks for joining us on Business Insight and Plus TV Africa. Thank you so very much for having me. It's such an honor to connect with you today. All right, let's talk about transformational leadership and how business executives can explore that in management because right now a lot of people actually venture into businesses that are trying to beat their own bosses. But how can they make a difference through transformational leadership? Well, the first thing we need to do is to get to define what leadership is all about. Then we can now narrow down to transformational leadership because this is one of the styles of leadership that we do have and it is very, very effective. The first thing is to come down to the fundamentals of leadership by definition and leadership in simple terms is the capacity to be able to galvanize a group of people together in order to accomplish a very, very strategic goal that brings about the advancement of that particular group. In simple terms, people always say leadership is influence. I always say that leadership as influence is not result oriented in itself by itself. So we always say leadership is a utilization of influence to accomplish a specific objective. Having said that, as we come to the various styles of leadership which are bound and I do not want to go into that today because that's not our focus. I'd like us to funnel down to transformational leadership which is our focus of conversation. The reality is you never see any nation that has moved from anything to a significant thing as a nation, either from a third world country to a first world country where you do not find transformational leadership style at work. Whether it's in Singapore or you find in Dubai, what you find is transformational leadership. In Africa, Nigeria in particular, in the business community in Nigeria, the time has come for us to go beyond the story, the narrative that follows our businesses that businesses do not last in Nigeria. The reality is that the reason why these businesses don't last is because of the kind of leadership that we find in these businesses which is usually transactional. In our political space, what you find is transactional. In most of our organizations, what you find is transactional kind of leadership, but the leadership that will bring about transgenerational businesses, that will bring about political stability is what we call transformational leadership. When we're talking about transformational leadership, basically we're talking about the kind of leadership that causes change and it's important to note this, two things. The transformational leadership style is the style of leadership that causes change in the leader, in the people, the individuals who are around the leader and in the social system around that organization. In essence, a transformational leader creates change in the people and causes them to accomplish great goals through one word, inspiration. All right. Not by punishment, not by rewards, but by inspiration. Good thing you've mentioned inspiration. A lot of people, they feel that just because they have the well-adult, they have the capital, they have all it takes to bring people together, bring resources and human capital together. Automatically that makes them a leadership. But you talked about inspiration. For instance, now let us bring you to a business cycle, to a business workplace, for instance. Now you have people under you and they look up to you to give them direction on how to grow or the way, the direction that the business is supposed to follow. How do you bring this issue of inspiration to bell when you might not really have them all it takes just because you have just the finances? Well, maybe I should put it this way. It's important to note that when a person, let's say for instance you're starting a business and you've got people together based on their different competencies and capacity to contribute significantly in the various areas where you employ them to work. If all the people come to do is to walk for salary, you're just going to get an average organization. The organization will never rise to its maximum potential. You know, that's why when I walk with organizations, when I walk with CEOs, what I try to do is to make sure I help talk with the management and leadership team to see beyond working for salary. The worst thing that any CEO can do is to gather people and make them work for salary. Such an organization will never rise into its maximum potential. But when you begin to paint a bigger picture, when the people begin to see how connected their visions are with the vision of the organization, when the people begin to see the larger, the greater good that they do, then you begin to see people doing much more than what they would have done just because of salary. I think CEOs are actually undermining the potential of their organization if all they do or when all they do is to gather people together. And the only motivation in that organization is salary promotion, punishment and rewards. I think it's important that we go beyond all of that to begin to paint a bigger picture. Now, the art of inspiration, I call it the art, the art of inspiration is what most business leaders don't know how to navigate. So they must also be taught as executives or pre-exects. All right, it's a good one. I'm glad you actually mentioned the CEOs and what they need to know. I know over time that you have been dealing with CEOs across, but not just in Nigeria alone, but in Africa and other parts of the world. If you were to advise entrepreneurs who are trying to start their own businesses in the country in the face of the year 2023, what would that mean advice be? You've talked about rewards system, you talked about punishment and motivation through salaries and promotion. What should they be focusing on as they bring people and the resources together? Well, thank you so very much. That's a very great question for startups. The first thing I believe that a startup must have already done is to have been able to identify gaps in society in terms of needs that people do have. And I do believe that the startup, the entrepreneur who has been able to identify gaps in society has been able to package a solution and intervention, has been able to package a product or has been able or she's been able to put together services that will be able to deal with the gap that the person has been able to identify. Haven't been able to put together solution. Haven't been able to put together services that will act as intervention basically in the area where the startup has found the gap. It is now critical that this startup, the entrepreneur must practice the following. Number one, the entrepreneur must go out there and at least, the entrepreneur must first at least the right people. You see Jim Collins in the book, Good to Great will always tell you that the first thing you do is to get the right people on board. The right people on board. Don't even bother about thinking of where you're headed to. Sit down, get the right people on board. So the startup must at least, that's the first thing the startup must do, at least the right people. Number two, the startup must now envision them, envision them. Letting the vision that the CEO shares with the people who have come to work with the CEO, letting their motivation be driven by your vision of something grandiose, something extraordinary, that their contribution will help the organization to make.  Of course the salary will be there, but you see they are no longer working for salary, they are working for this grand vision. So enlist them and vision them and number three, equip them. You want to make sure as a CEO you give them the tools, the skills, you want to give them the right environment for them to be able to maximize their potential within their work time in your environment. The last thing you want to do is that you want to engage them. This is where proper deployment in their various unit through the right onboarding process really takes place. I wish I can go on, but I think these four steps will help any CEO boarding entrepreneur pre-exec. Alright, let's talk more concerning this and transformational leadership and Eva, maybe there are some characteristics that we should be talking about because over time I have heard that for you to be an ideal leader or a transformational leader, you have to be involved, you have to be an inspirational team player. Most of the times you find out that most people but just want to boss over and lot over people who work with them. Are there unique distinctive characteristics that we'll talk about in transformational leadership?  There are four things that really defines a transformational leader, which is now the strength of a transformational leader is measured by the mastery of the four things I'm about to mention. Every transformational leader must master these four major characteristics or what we call the traits of a transformational leader. Incidentally, this happens to be my area of focus at my masters. My masters was in the area of leadership and transformational leadership was my major area of focus. One of the major characteristics of a transformational leader is what we call idealized influence. Idealized influence. This is where the leader leads by example. And trust me, you know very well that most of our business organizations, the CEOs are the ones who destroy the culture of that particular organization. They tell the staff to do a particular thing and they go counter cultural or they go counter to what they tell the staff to do because they believe it doesn't matter what I do. It truly does matter. For a transformational leader, you lead by example. You are a role model. And trust me, if we're going to see transformational, you know, results in most of our organizations and in our country, we need to see leaders right up at the front. We need to see leaders saying, follow me. We need to see leaders say, look at what I'm doing. We need to see leaders put their hands in the work and we need to see them become the role models. Number two, every transformational leader has something we call inspirational motivation. It's a trait that transformational leaders have mastered. What does it mean to have inspirational motivation as a skill? The leader is able to set challenging goals. Is able to set goals that inspires the team to accomplish great things. So the leader is an inspirational person, able to motivate the people by setting amazing goal. And like you rightly stated before, the leader also is part of the team who also brings to pass the achievement of those particular goals. Number three, it's critical to know that the leader who is called a transformational leader has mastered something we call is intellectual stimulation, intellectual stimulation. By that, we mean that the leader is able to create an environment where creativity and innovation flourishes. Members of the organization staff are allowed to cover creative ideas. And no creative idea is looked down upon. The research and development department or unit of that organization is very functional. If you're going to have a high, yes, if you're going to have a high performing organization, it is critical that we have intellectual stimulation. And finally, the transformational leader must have what we call individualized consideration. What does that mean? The leader must go beyond looking at the staff in that organization as numbers. The leader must learn to relate with each of them as a person to the best of the leader's ability. And the leader is able to also distill that through the management leadership management team down into the organization, whereby everyone counts, everyone matters. There is empathy in the organization. We get to know how you're doing, how you're fearing, and what can we do to value to your life? Because if it matters to them, if it what matters to them matters to us, what matters to us will matter to them. All right Samoye, thanks for the insight you have shared so far. But we'll take a quick break and we'll come back. We'll try to find out the place of our emotional intelligence and of course encouraging participation and communication in terms of business leadership and transformation. It's still business insight and plus TV Africa. We'll take a quick break and we'll be right back with more. Do join us again. I welcome back. It's still business insight and plus TV Africa and we still have Samoye, transformational leadership and expert. Now we're looking at the place of business leadership and transformational change. Thanks for staying with us Samoye. You're welcome. All right, before we went on the break, I wanted to find that the place of emotional intelligence in all of this and of course how you can encourage participation and communication and to ensure effective leadership in your chain of command as an organization. It's important to know that when there is communication without emotion, people get into a state of frustration. I mean imagine talking to someone you never, you don't even consider the fact that this is a human being. So your tonality, the way you talk, the volume with which you talk, the speed with which you talk and just imagine all of that when someone is talking to you in an organization and the person is not even thinking about the fact that a human being who have your own feelings and all of that, the person is even a mindful of your body gesture. The reality is you're going to put up a defense and that's what we say. Defensiveness comes in and so you begin to talk, the people are stonewalling you, they are being defensive, they don't want to even hear what you're saying. So here's the key. Emotional intelligence and social intelligence are non-negotiable factors in the life of a transformational leader and that has to do with the ability to master your thinking with your feeling, the ability to understand your own feelings and be able to utilize your feeling and your thinking to be able to achieve your set goals. Similarly, emotional intelligence is also the capacity to be able to understand the feelings and the thinking of the people you are leading. You cannot ignore their feelings and want to engage their buying. If they are going to buy in, it is critical that you also demonstrate some level of empathy. So it is very critical in communicating, in trying to inspire people as leaders. It is critical that their emotions be taken into account.  Here's what I want to say, sir. I always say to my leaders that if you're going to be effective in the boardroom, you want to make sure you give attention to the people outside the boardroom. If you want to be effective in the organization during work hours, you want to also be in touch with the people outside of work hours. It means you have emotional intelligence. It is critical that we give emotional intelligence a very strong place in our leadership journey as transformational leaders. All right, and Sam Oyi, let's try to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and of course head of board of directors in the organization who are actually struggling in the organization as much as possible. If you were to advise for a business, a business rather, that is actually not really doing well in terms of they having a leadership challenge and they don't really know where to turn is a new year and they're looking at scaling up their business for the year 2023. What would that one major advice be? It's difficult to call it one major advice because there are a few things. Number one, I would say the first thing to always do is to go back to the core ideology of the organization. The core ideology of every organization includes the vision statement, mission statement, includes the values of that particular organization. All of that nestled together becomes the core ideology. Who are we? What are we trying to do? Where are we going to? It is when we have the core ideology right in the front, then we then ask ourselves, we now do what we call the auditing of our leadership team. We then ask ourselves how many of those who are currently in our leadership team actually have the competencies to deliver on our core ideology? Did we employ people based on sentiment? Did I bring in a leader because he's my brother? Did I bring in a leader because it's from my tribe? Did I bring in a leader because my brother told me to employ him? All the sentiment, audit your leadership team and try to determine the competence of each leader. These are these, the core ideology of the company. What are you bringing on board that will enable us as an organization to accomplish the lofty great ideas or what we call our core ideology? If the leaders on board lack the competencies, identify if one is trainable, if they are trainable leaders who have spent time with you and they exemplify the values of the organization to the extent to which they exemplify the values of the organization and they look trainable, you may say, look, can I train this one and give this person time and see if he can fit it? But if the person is not trainable, does not exemplify the values of the organization, does not even align with our core ideologies, you may have to take the right and the top decision CEOs have to take at the beginning of the year, let them go. All right, Sam, very quickly before we let you go, the final question would be for people who have actually been under leadership and they are thinking of springing up and being their own bosses this year. They want to move to the entrepreneurship of development level. What should they be looking at as the year 2023 that gets on spring? First thing I would say is if you want to start anything, clarity, you want to be very, very clear. In one of my books, I talked about the emerging leaders and I talked about as a leader, if you're going to do anything, you want to build an organization the first in first. Jim Collins will tell you always starts with the future in mind. So clarity of vision is very critical. You must have a clear and commanding vision, not emotion, not just passion, not just that I feel like doing something by myself or you just have this emotional drive because friends are doing it. There must be a clear and commanding vision. Number two, timing. I've seen so many young potential entrepreneurs, I've seen them with great vision, but I think the problem was timing. You don't just jump out because you have a vision. Sometimes the best thing for you is to stay where you are working, give yourself some time, not just to get money, store money, but to also learn to get skills, to understand the true dynamics of running an enterprise. So it's critical that vision is critical timing. It's important. And of course, the next thing I've got. Yes, sir. I think I'll stop there. Alright, we must say a very big thank you to you could actually just go on and on because when we talk about entrepreneurship development and of course, transformation leadership, there are so much inroads and insights to be shared. But we must say a very big thank you to you, Sam Oye, for joining us on Business Insights for this time. Well, thank you so very much. And I must commend the great work that you do. I mean, you are simply just amazing. Just a right man for the job. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sam Oye. And that's the size of the show for this week. I am Justin Acadonia. Many thanks for watching and see you again next time. Bye for now.