Good evening and welcome to episode 407 of the Private Property Podcast. I'm your host is Amandamwa Kumailo. It's a Friday edition of the Private Property Podcast, the very last Friday that we're going to be coming to you live in 2021. If you join us for the first time, you have been missing out on some great episodes tackling all things relating to property. Do make sure that you watch our Facebook or YouTube page to catch up on all the great episodes. Of course, you can go to Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast from. And to all our regular viewers on Facebook, Instagram, as well as on YouTube, welcome to it. You know how we do every single week that you and I have an appointment at 7 p.m. We're always in conversation with a property expert who helps us make better property decisions. It doesn't matter where you are on your property journey, whether you're looking to buy, to sell, to build your tenant or your landlord, we're here to make sure that you've got the best insight, knowledge, tips and tricks to make your property journey a smooth one. And talking about making your property journey a smooth one, you know, that we also have a whole host of other incredible shows that you can look forward to across private properties, social media pages. As it is in Friday, I think it said Mondays because this was a public holiday. As it is a Friday, you can catch Chad on the Home Shopper Show and it comes to your screens every Fridays and Mondays at 8 p.m. And every Tuesdays and Thursdays on Balenoa, God takes you through the farming and podcasts tackling all things agriculture. And on Wednesdays, AC Class and takes us through the first time home buyers show. And of course, those are great shows every single weekday that you can look forward to at 8 p.m. The other thing that you can look forward to, of course, is a great competition that we are running and slowly wrapping up as we wrap up 2022. And in 2021, you see how I'm already throwing forward to the following year I'm certainly excited to see what that new year is going to bring. But before we jump the gun, let us of course close up 2021 on the right note. And the thing that you can look forward to is that great competition that we run on our Facebook page. We want to find out from you some of the great property insight expert advice that you have picked up from and share with it. Share it with us in the comments section. And you will stand a chance of walking away with five hundred grand's in cash every single weekday. And of course, if the lucky winner does not raise their hand and claim that price, the money keeps getting more and more in the money bag. Now, I know that yesterday I was not at the fort. You had a stand and present it, but you did have a winner for this competition. So we're back at five hundred grand's in the money bag. We'll see who this evening's lucky winner is. And of course, if they are watching us, all you have to do is drop us a message in order to claim your prize. Well, I'm wrapping up the week. I think this has been one of those very long, fast weeks. And there's a part of me that I've forgotten that today is actually a weekday because I thought it might be a Saturday and I think around 10, 11 a.m. I kept getting work calls and I had to remind myself that it's still a workday. And of course, that meant that later on this evening was going to be joining you. And we're going to be talking about something that you know, we talk about this time of year because we've done it before. We're looking at how to maintain a good credit score. It is the first season. So many things tend to happen when it comes to our spending during the festive season or even taking extra credit that we may not necessarily need. And all these things have a knock on effect on our credit score. And the reality is, as much as it is a big December, and many of us want to probably go big, the reality of the financial repercussions, especially when it comes to your credit score, that tends to be quite significant in the new year. So we're going to be looking at how to maintain your credit score, particularly during this festive season. What are some of the things that you also just need to do well, especially if you're going to have property ambitions for 2022 and as far as your credit score is concerned, things to watch out for, things to be on top of. And you know, some of the fraud that we're also seeing, how you can also make sure that you buckle proof yourself as much as possible against that and to help us get a good sense when it comes to all things credit score related. I'm joined this evening by Michelle Dickens, the CEO at TPN Credit Bureau. Michelle, good evening. And thank you so much for joining us on the show. I'm a lovely, always a pleasure to come and chat about property or credit or credit profile or just credit health and financial health in general. And I think, Michelle, one of the big things that I absolutely love every time we have a conversation is we make talking about our credit health very accessible because it is one of those things that people tend to struggle with. You know, sometimes you may have perhaps damaged your credit health and you think that you can repair it in two months, whereas the reality is you probably took a significant period of time to damage it. And I like the fact that we're even using credit health because it's one of those things. Sometimes our health takes a while to deteriorate and you're not going to fix it in a two day period or a two month period. And sometimes it can be very rapid and but fixing it still takes quite a significant amount of time. I think, firstly, before we even look at the net equities from a holistic level, what are some of the key things that we always need to bear in mind when it comes to keeping and, you know, keeping and, of course, maintaining a good credit record and making sure that we have a really good credit health? Well, I think the starting point is understanding where you are at the moment. So the first thing in terms of creating a positive credit profile for yourself is knowing the starting point. So what does your credit profile look like at the moment? And then understanding if there are areas that need to be worked on, what are those different areas and prioritising them? Because sometimes it can be too overwhelming to do everything all in one go. So it's about prioritising each individual item in your profile to create, to set yourself on a path to build a positive credit profile. And then that's exactly what it is. It's a path. It's not just I've done the work. I've got myself back into a positive or a good, healthy credit score. And then relaxing and shifting lifestyle. Credit health is a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle choice that needs to be maintained on a monthly basis. So maybe if I could, I'm just going to keep I'm just going to keep jumping in a long, if I can, I'm just going to keep fantastic. I'm just going to keep jumping in a long about step one, getting your credit profile. There's a number of different credit bureaus in the marketplace. I like to use my trance union, don't see it like today. It's online and you can access once per annual free credit profile. And this gives you a good indication of what's on your record at the moment. Once you've had a look at it, what most people want to do is they want to identify areas where there may be issues. So data that could be inaccurate. And that then takes us to the next step, which is we would log a dispute with the bureau at Trance Union and say, let's have a look at this information. Log a dispute with the credit bureau. This information is inaccurate. I'd like for it to be updated. This is such a wonderful tool because it means that consumers don't need to go and fight with each one of their credit providers. They don't need to go through a run around. There's a legislative process. It's 20 business days. You log your dispute with the bureau. The bureau will investigate on your behalf. So there's no cost or frustration involved from the consumer's perspective. The bureau's will then do an investigation. They'll get the credible evidence from the credit provider and they'll make a finding us to the accuracy. But it hasn't just stopped there. And you know, Michelle, when you talk about that, it actually remind me there was an issue that I also had in my own profile. There was an account that I had actually closed off years ago that was still showing on the profile. And you could see that it's closed, but it's still sort of reflected. And it should have, it was over two years old. And I had to literally say to them that this was closed. I think it was a good three, four years ago. It should not be reflecting on my profile. And they had made me an insurance company because I changed insurance companies. And so the old one was actually still in the system. And I obviously didn't want it to reflect because you don't want things that are no longer part of your profile to also be there. It was dealt with very quickly, very seamlessly. They said, you know, these are the things which it's like to send to us, send them through and within X business days. I can't remember how long it took to resolve it, but it really was a pain, you know, a painless process. And I think sometimes we don't know that we can do that. And more often than not, people also just, we don't take the step of checking what what is reflected on our credit profile. More often than not, by the time we see that it's when we're actually applying for a new line of credit and then we are told about, well, you're overdebted. And you think, but I don't think I am, as far as I'm concerned, but adequate debt for when we actually didn't see it. There are all these other things, some you may have already cancelled and some were probably even fordulently, you know, put on. How can we then best be on top of what is actually what the credit bureaus, what info they have on us and what kind of data is out there, whether it's inquiries or, of course, if you know, their judgments or whatever the case is. So it's such a lovely question, because the credit bureau environment doesn't stand still. It's changing all the time. So, for example, changing legislation, judgments, you know, if you get a judgment on your name, it's prescription is only 30 years. In other words, a credit provider can come and collect that debt for 30 years later. But the bureaus only store the information for five years. And that's because after five years, that type of information really shouldn't impact your behavior as to how you pay at the moment. So even though the credit provider can still collect on it, the bureaus retain only for five years. Change in legislation was, well, we shouldn't expect the consumer to go through a process through the courts to get a recision order, which is a costly order. That information should be removed as soon as it's paid up. And so there's change to the legislation with the National Credit Act to state that as soon as a judgment is paid up, a credit provider must instruct the bureaus within seven days to remove that data. Rehabilitation, right? It's rewards for good behavior. You've got adverse information. Adverse information used to sit on a person's credit profile for three years. Then it was two years, now it's only one year. Again, speaking to is the information the bureaus holding at the moment going to give relevant information as to how you're going to be paying your accounts at the moment? And again, the change in legislation was, well, an adverse listing stayed in your profile for three years. Now the legislation says an adverse listing is removed as soon as it's paid up. And again, some are talking to rehabilitation, rewarding, getting people back into the financial system, the credit system once they have rehabilitated their behavior. And then, of course, you've got your payment profile. And this is what I think that is the most misunderstood out of all the different types of credit, lines of data that the credit bureaus are holding. So the credit bureaus are collecting data every single month on every single consumer's credit agreement. Your payday loans, your vehicle loans, your store loans, store cards, cell phones, toll codes, insurance, etc. And what the bureaus collect every month is how is that account being paid every month? So what is the total value update that you've taken out? What is the value that's still outstanding? What is your monthly commitment? And then how do you pay that account on a monthly basis? This data builds up this wonderful analysis over a time series of how you pay your accounts. And this will help to devolve whether you're going into hard time. So you've been a good payer and now things are becoming a little bit more difficult or if you've had a difficult period, but you've actually rehabilitated yourself. And so this allows the bureaus and credit providers to weight the data. So the more recent the data is, the more it's going to impact your credit profile. And that's why when you spoke about it earlier, you think I'm going to clean up my credit profile in two days or even two months. It takes longer because you've got to get to a point where you're rehabilitating yourself from the bureaus and the credit providers who are going to be issuing credit are seeing that for the last six months, you've been able to maintain and pay your accounts on a monthly basis. It's not just about the negative information of the data, but it's also about your income. And I think this is where budgeting becomes so important.  What is being allocated to debts? What is being allocated to household living expenses? Things like your rent, your school fees, your groceries, fuel for the car, transport, you know what I'm saying? Sixty eight percent of our salaries are spent on housing, on medical expenses, putting food on the table and transport. Sixty eight percent of our salary is gone, right? Budgeting is so important. And so once you've looked at your budget and you've identified that that you can spend on credit, credit providers are also looking over how much of that credit are you using? This is credit utilization. So we look at your credit facilities, your credit cards, your stock cards. What is the total value that you have outstanding? And how much are you accessing on a monthly basis? So you're going out, you've got, you know, a 20,000 grand credit limit or credit card and you're spending all of that. That's 100 percent utilization. You're going to be penalized for that kind of behavior. Whereas if you only spend 30 percent of the value that you have of those stock cards and credit cards, that's the kind of number that the credit providers are looking to see you utilize. And as that goes higher, it becomes more and more difficult for you to maintain full repentance of that. This evening, I am in conversation with Michelle Dickens, the CEO of the TPN Credit Bureau, looking at how to maintain a good credit score, especially during this festive season. And of course, in the new year, this is one of those things that has a knock on effect on different aspects of our lives beyond buying a property and even negotiating the interest rate. But also, you know, landlords typically also look at somebody's credit score and credit profile before making sure that they let you stay in their place, because I also need to check if you can, in fact, afford that place. We're going to go for a quick break. We'll be taking your questions, comments, related to all things credit score and credit profile related. We'll do this break. We're going to see who the lucky winner of the 500 grand that is in the money bag. And of course, when you come back, more questions, comments and looking at, you know, what do we then do? Especially right now during COVID, people who've been working a lot of contract work and not securing full-time employment. How do you also make sure that your credit score doesn't get negatively affected, given the nature of the work that you are doing? But in the meantime, let's have a quick break and see who the lucky winner of our competition is. And that lucky winner this evening is T.R.T. Munoz. T.R.T. Munoz, congratulations. 500 grand in the money bag this evening. I hope that you are watching. And if you are, drop us a message down here below in order for you to claim your prize. And we're back this evening with Michelle Dickens as we round up the week and certainly start getting ready for rounding up the year. You can look forward to an amazing episode that we've got lined up for you next week. I did say that, you know, there's something special brewing. I know that many of you at home are absolutely going to enjoy it. Do stay clear to our social media page. Just to find out what I am talking about, we're going to be letting you in on the great offer that we've got for that final episode that we are going to have next week. And I think one of the other things is I suddenly want to find out from you some of the things that you have picked up on the show and you can drop that on the pinned post on our Facebook page and that automatically has you entering a competition that we are running. Now to go to your questions and comments and some of the love that you're getting on our social media pages, tuned in Michelle Bomerance, happiness Malulika, Kuzor Ramusal is watching. Matashina is saying, get notifications on your profile. And that's a very handy tip, you know, that means whenever a credit provider looks into your profile or somebody wants to take a loan of credit, you get notified and so you'd be able to pick up any potential fraud very quickly. And we've got uprinz Mazubu saying, if you're married in community of property, will your partner's affordability affect your score? So what happens then, Michelle? You are married, I have my husband and I have an amazing, you know, credit score. My husband's credit score, not so much.  But unfortunately, my partner does not have a great credit score. Will his, you know, terrible credit score affect how we are going to be able to get a house? Yeah, so your credit profile and your partner's or your spouse's credit profile, when you're married in community of property, don't necessarily impact every line of credit that you've earned and make applications. So where are you going and making application for a home loan, for example? And the house is going to be purchased in both your names. And you're both going to have, your affordability is going to count towards both of you. Certainly for an in-community of property application. Where you're married out of community of property and the property that you're purchasing requires both partners, both spouses, from an affordability perspective. Again, both spouses, both people, application and credit profile is going to be important. For the most part, if you're going out and taking up, for example, a cell phone account or an insurance account, the fact that you're married in community of property is not necessarily going to impact your application where your affordability can be met on your salary, your individual salary alone. So it depends on the type of credit. But for a home loan, particularly the purchasing and selling of a property where you're in community of property requires both spouses consent in order to do that. Really the reality is that should you not be able to settle up your debt or your spouse is not able to settle up their debt, then the credit providers can come after both spouses. And that's when it becomes quite a difficult situation. If your spouse is taken on more credit that you've not been aware of, that you then become liable for as a result of that, how far away you've been to your marriage arrangements. We've got a comment here coming through from what's up with what you're saying. Always keep your credit spending just under 50% or even better at 30% or less. The lesser your spending is to income, the better your rating. Secondly, do not spend because you have a credit card or an account, but buy with the purpose which is reasonable inside. The more frequently you buy, even when not necessarily the more you appear to be credit-reliant, but honestly, and this is the part that I really want you to touch on with, but honestly, how the overall credit score is calculated remains a mystery. And this is a very huge take or very common rather take that people are still not quite getting how we get there. And I know that's probably a full episode by itself, but just at a brief level, perhaps just to also put Seppo's mind that is how our scores are roughly composed of? Because I know we always get this question and this comment where people still don't quite get a sense of where, how is this actually happening? Some people are like, but I'm paying on time. I pay more than the minimum. I'm not seeing it moving. How do I get to almost a perfect score, whatever that even looks like? Yeah, that's a secret source, Hazama. Thank you. So no, there's some fundamentals. Each bureau has their own score. So it's not standardized across the industry. Each bureau has its own score. And then on top of that, a credit provider doesn't simply look at the credit bureau data in order to make an assessment. That's third-party data. So a credit bureau for a credit provider would be third-party data. They're also going to look at their own internal data. So what information does say you're going and applying for a home loan? What information does the bank have on you already in terms of your transactional banking that can support the mortgage? And it could be that because you're banking with your own bank, you're more likely to get the funding at a better rate because the bank knows more about you. So what goes into it? Well, the first thing is it's about let's distinguish between a person with a thin file. In other words, a person who doesn't have a lot of information on them in traditional credit sensors. They're mostly maybe quite still young with not many lines of credit or they use cash transactions. Me personally, if you were to look at my credit profile, I'm one of those thin file type of people. And there's not a lot of information on my own credit profile. So that's a thin file person. Then you've got people with a lot of information on them and you've got to have enough information to support more credit, but not too much that we can see that you're overindicted already. So how do you distinguish the difference? Well, it's about understanding information about you that looks at the recency of the data. So how old is the data is what I'm saying. The older the data is, the less it impacts the score and the more recent the data is, the more it impacts your score.  So it's not simply I have a judgment therefore it's negatively affected, it's when was that judgment taken? Then some of it also includes the value of that judgment. So how many you have and what is the value outstanding?  So we're looking at what the value is. Then we look at adverse listing. So it's not just do you have a judgment, it's also do you have an adverse listing? And an adverse listing again, recency and the value and how many you have. And the third thing is then those payment profile lines. And this is probably the most important and has the biggest weighting on your data. So what we're looking at here is what is the total commitment that you have to all your credit providers? We're gonna sum up every single credit agreement that you have. In other words, you have car finance, you have a home loan, you have four different credit cards, you have a store card, you have payday loan, you have, I'm trying to make this up, cell phone account, insurance account, how many of these accounts do you have? And what is the total value of credit that you've taken out in total? What is the total value that's outstanding today? So you may have a home loan, you've taken out a million round home loan, but only 800,000 is outstanding still today. And what is the value of the repayment on a monthly basis? Then we can look at the total value, the total value outstanding as of today's date and what the total value commitment that you have to all those credit providers is on a monthly basis. That's going to form part of the affordability assessment because simply because you have a good score, doesn't necessarily mean that you have the affordability in the mean store. So you might still have a good credit score, but the amount that you're looking to transact, there's no amount that you're looking to transact might push you over into an overindicated assessment. And that's going to impact your score as well. And then of course, when we're looking at those payment profile lines, it's about understanding, are you paying your accounts on time and in full every month or did you miss some accounts? And it might have just been, I've got too busy and it was a small amount and you thought you'd catch that next month. That miss payment has quite a big impact. And the more recent that miss payment is, the bigger of an impact that it's going to have on your credit profile. And then of course, it's the credit utilization. And this is where I spoke about the credit cards and the store cards. These are accounts that you have a value outstanding for but you may not access it. So you might not go and spend on your credit card this month or actually, it's December. There's extra expenses in December. And so you might overutilize your cards in December. So every month you could access or neutralize a different portion of these credit cards or store cards. And so what credit utilization is about is about how much is this access that you have to credit gets called at the 100,000 rent and how much have you utilized of that 100,000 rent? 60,000 rent. Well, 60 out of 100 is 60%. And the Bureau of Environment says that that's quite a big chunk. So you're gonna get penalized. If you only, as the previous quarter said, utilizing 30 to 50% of that facility that's in line with getting yourself a better credit score. So there's so many moving parts as I'm at. The best thing to do is honestly to have a look at your credit profile, to understand what's on there. You know, we're told to look at our bank statements every month, make sure that there's nothing that got deducted, that wasn't meant to get deducted. It's the same with our credit profiles. Have a look at your credit profile and identify information that is not being accurately updated and have it removed. And you can do monitoring. So it's not just about accessing your credit profile, but you can also monitor your profile. And so coming into that full conversation, you'll get a notification if anyone's done a credit check one year, where you haven't made an application. That's your first alert then to say, but hold on a second, I'm not going out looking for credit at the moment. And yet my credit profile's been pinned. How do I go about making sure that identity for is not about to start? And Michelle, as a rep of this evening, and you didn't mention this face of season, expenses that tend to come out, any tips for our viewers at home in terms of what they can do during this face of season to make sure that they don't get too ahead of themselves and do something that could potentially jeopardize their credit health. I think coming back to the budget summer, budgets are such an important thing. Making sure that we know what is the value that we're setting aside for this face of season, be it the holidays, be it presents for family and friends or whatever it is, what is the budget and I know it's difficult, but sticking within that budget because moving that budget and moving the goalposts only creates a big challenge for ourselves in the new year. And I think it would be so nice for all of us to enter the new year fresh rested and knowing that we don't have this additional stress of having to pay back a debt which we've taken out because we missed the boat on our budget. And I see that we've gotten a question coming in. And this is coming from all prints, we were saying judgments that happened during the pandemic. How much wage they have on one's profile is it considered the same as in previous years? That's a fantastic question because the bureaus do change. They do change and they change every, you know, regularly the bureaus are reviewing the weighting of the data and also the impact that COVID and the pandemic had on people's credit profiles. So there was relief that was given during the pandemic from a payment profile perspective and the impact that that would have on your score. So judgments that were taken during the pandemic itself, I don't think that there's any difference on the weighting of the data. It was more weighting of the data of the payment profile information. You know, judgment takes quite a long period of time to get to the point of taking judgment. Going about and creating a payment plan and getting it settled and then going and having it removed from your credit profile, that's the key element here. Another really great question coming through from Gattakwa Khaapa saying, does the nature of the credit have an impact on the credit score? For example, having multiple fixed cell phone contracts is much better than multiple clothing store accounts or are the credits that make wide-risk declines pretty much the same? So different credit providers are going to look at the data slightly differently as well. And it's simply because there's a generic credit bureau score, doesn't mean all bureau scores are treated the same with an credit provider environment. So different credit providers are going to look at the data slightly differently as well. I think the point is, the point is looking at your own credit profile and understanding the needs for that credit because if there's a need for that type of credit, fundamentally, that's something that a consumer's going to have on their credit profile. So it's not about saying, well, how do I manipulate my credit score based on the type of credit that I have? The credit that a consumer takes should be met with it, should be servicing a need that the consumer has, not just the R1-5, you know, cell phone accounts and six different store cards. It should be meeting a need. Michelle, we're going to leave it there this evening. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. And of course, joining us throughout the year, I hope you and your team are going to have a really great festive season. Thanks so much. Always a pleasure to participate. Thank you. And to Ulysses as all, happy holidays. Thank you very much. And that's Michelle Dickens, the CEO at the CPN Credit Bureau, wrapping up the Friday edition of the private property park costume myself, Osama Donga Kumalo. Unfortunately, we did not have a claim. So we've got to roll over to next week Monday. 1,000 rounds are going to be in the money bag. And that's how we wrap up. Well, it sort of felt like a long weekend. I know some of you are already on leave, but a few of us are already going to be ending next week. Well, we're going to be back on Monday, still doing those kind regards. But until then, hope you stay home and stay safe.


Our next speaker will be Marcus Flinders. And Marcus is the founding attorney of Marcus Flinders law firm, specializes in corporate and business law, as well as tax planning and litigation, if you need some help, see him afterwards. He also has over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur and businessman. Marcus holds a BS in philosophy from Utah Valley University, a JD from Valparaiso University, and an LLM in taxation from the University of Denver. Marcus served a mission to Côte d'Ivoire for the LDS church, is married and has three children. I'll also add that Marcus is currently serving as general counsel for the Mormon Trans-Humanist Association. We are well represented there. Please welcome Marcus Flinders. It's a creative name for a law firm, isn't it? Just name it after your own self. I was tempted to just prepare this while everybody else was talking, as I normally do for my lessons in church at the sacrament meeting. It would probably be better than what I have if I would have done that. And furthermore, as you know my name, Flinders, the Flind effect did not go to me. It didn't pass to me. Hopefully my kids will get it, but arguably I did not get that increase in IQ. So, interesting topic at an MTA conference, I'm sure is taxation. I do appreciate that I get to speak about this before you eat. That way maybe we'll still be awake at the end of this. I just wrote down some ideas and concepts and hopefully I can breeze through some of these and answer some questions and maybe it becomes interesting to you. As I was thinking about what to talk about, Lincoln and I actually went through some discussion as to what I could bring to the discussion and I think taxation becomes important and for this reason. You know the Mormon Trans-Humanism Association, trans-humanists in general postulate an idea of immortality. And I think sometimes we focus on this immortality as overcoming physical pain, overcoming the concept of illness, sickness and death. But sometimes I feel like in discussion that we lose sight of this issue, joyous immortality. So how does that relate to taxation? Taxation is a concept that is created. It's not created in advance of society, it's created as a result of society. So how do we put together a society that not only gives us immortality, but joyous immortality? A community of people that take care of each other that get along. I like this quote Benjamin Franklin gave in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. I think we have a pretty good group of people who are trying to overcome the first and I do believe that we need to overcome the second. And not overcome in the sense that we're trying to overcome death, where death is non-existent. Create something that is joyous, joyous taxation. Those are two words that I've never heard together until now and here we have them. So one thing comes up, why do I use the word taxation? And instead of tithing or offerings or contributions, and I think that it does us a disservice to use the term tithe. Tithe automatically denotes acceptability, right? I mean it says that God made us do it, God told us to do it, so we must do it. And tithe denotes a 10%. I think that's antithetical to our goals and our missions to think of a 10% contribution as being acceptable or solving our problems. Taxation additionally is synonymous with more of a secularism, although we do see it in the scriptures, King Noah was head of the church and he taxed the people. And then, and I think we need to overcome the idea that for there to be some sort of a taxation or a gift program that must be within the confines of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You know, we are a 2% people if you're talking about the church itself and for us to hope that the church is the theocracy of the whole world I think puts us behind the eight ball, puts us backwards into our thinking. We need to accept the idea that there are good and just men and women who will help us and will be part of this taxation and community structure. So that's why I use the term taxation. Taxation in the scriptures is always negative. It's always negative. King Noah taxed the people. You know, Broplkesh taxed the people. And tax is a burden. But the reasons for the burden are for this. If you go in Messiah, when King Noah taxed the people, he did it for his own personal gain, right? Greed, lust, desires. He built up personal materialism for himself. That is all the way through the scriptures. Every time we hear the word tax, it's one entity or person taking from, and most likely, or people to be lazy. It basically pays their way to sit on their thrones. Well, when we use the word tithe, most of the time it's a 10%, but in church history, tithe has also been at different rates. But the word tithe is always positive. When we tithe the people, it's positive. Well, the reason it's positive is because the tithe is never just for one person. It's given to Zion. It's given to the church to distribute to the poor and the needy, or it's given to the needy, the fatherless, the widows. We read about that in Deuteronomy that the widows, they're giving directly to the widows, the needy, the fatherless, and the Lord is happy with them, and then they can say that they've given to the people. So the biggest differences that we have, and when we just talk about some of the positive versus the negative aspects of this concept, are positive, it goes to the people. Negative, it's focused on one singular entity. It's a very greedy laziness idea. The other thing that I feel like we have to overcome when we talk about taxation, at least leading up to a millennial world or a paradisical state or a celestial type state is the idea of agency. And I hear this all the time, especially in our current political discourse, that it's good to give to people, but I don't want to be made to give to people. And that the United States government or whatever government we have makes me pay taxes. And God doesn't make me pay taxes. However, if you go back and read almost every scripture that has to do with tithing, there's a subsequent scripture that says you're going to be burned at the coming of Christ or suffer endless damnation. And I ask my friends in these discussions to say, would you rather have five years in prison for tax evasion in the US government or eternal damnation? Like, I think the government is less persuasive than God for believers anyway. So I don't think that we can just totally say, let's take away this idea of persuasion. I think when we talk to each other, we're fairly agreeable that when good people get together and a majority of them make a decision, that seems to be good. And it requires a community effort. That's okay to set laws with consequences. And then agency in turn becomes, and I'll quote Lincoln from a Twitter message he put out a while ago, was agency is the choice between consequences. Now, that can only go so far because at some point when they start draining your bank account without your knowledge and maybe tie your hands, you do fall into more of a tyranny and a tyrant state. And then it's, you know, you're taking care of people and it's beyond even duty and blessings. So taxation usually involves, you know, a governing body. I think a lot of people, when I talk to them, anticipate a life in their celestial world without a governing body. To me, that seems bizarre because we believe in order. We believe in structure. We believe in doing what we like to do, right? And not all of us like to create laws or to be involved in making the community a better place. And so some of us just wanna write books and some of us wanna be computer programmers, but we don't wanna be sitting in the Senate. And there will be, I anticipate, a council of gods. We read from Joseph Smith that he says the same thing. The council of gods made decisions for us or with us and agree and be agreeable. And of course we read Joseph Smith and Brigham Young all the time, talking about common consent and we could go into hours of discourse as to what that is and what agency really is. So now how do we, why did I even get into tax? And this will help with the final aspect of this is that taxation to me is infinitely interesting. Now you guys are like, oh my gosh, this guy is bizarre.  But taxation is truly the truth of society. If you study taxation over the course of time, you take a societal structure of taxation and you can, based on the, it's a game to play, figure out all the little channels and intricate relationships, kind of determine what the society was like. It's symptomatic. Our United States taxation system is very symptomatic of who we are. Case in point is state taxes.  But yet we as a society have come to this idea that it's important that wealth not be hoarded, that it is important for an economy to have money being exchanged. And if someone dies with $2.5 billion in their bank account or in their own stocks and it only goes to their family and rests in the small little group, it is bad for the economy. So for a while, the rules were so bad that it hurt the economy. It hurt entrepreneurship, it hurt farmers and then we came up with the next step. We gave all these credits to farmers because we want people to continue to farm and understood the capital structure and we changed that. And then we gave all these big exemptions for the estate tax to allow people to keep a considerable amount of wealth. I mean, $5 million per person in a relationship, $10 million for a couple without a tax aid. That's a pretty good amount of money to pass on to your generations. And so it also gives us one other thing really believe in, charitable organizations, that are designed for benevolent purposes. So it encourages, because you can give as much as you want without taxation to give that money to charities. And by the way, the MTA is a charitable organization. You can give your money anytime you want, we'll take it. So the future and what it holds then is how, and so I went to school to sum that up, partially because you can make money with no one how to understand this complicated tax code and I like money and I like the law and I have a business to run. But more importantly actually was the idea of really studying the intricate details of our sociology. Stuff I think we don't even understand about ourselves is written in that tax code and the regulations, it's about that big, it's on one and a half shelves in my office of the regulations and then that doesn't even include the publications and everything else and then the court determinations of what everything means. It is fascinating and I learn a lot about me and us by studying tax. So where do we go in the future? What makes a joyous taxation? I think very clearly whatever we do has to be for the purpose of people and we have to be a loving people. Where we are going to find excitement with the MTA is this and this is where I'm gonna postulate this, propose it out, I haven't developed it to the point where I can make a bold statement but eventually money is gonna be non-existent. I hope so. It's such a facade of power, of success. It is so deceitful to us in determining our future positions in the world of gods and abundance, we hope will be prevalent, right? We'll have food and we'll have stuff, the stuff that we think of in current taxation. Well, I think that the MTA's focus and Mormonism in general focuses on atonement and for our tax structure to be joyous, we have to focus on atonement. That everything we do is for the purpose of other people, is for the purpose of being Christ and I see a world where our taxation and Lincoln and I have discussed this before, taxation is something focused on charity, love, kindness, companionship, giving, offering and the interesting thing as I started to contemplate this was that when we're all sharing this world that we've just been talking about, where we're all gods and we have everything we need and we're fully satisfied, if there is no way to then contribute to each other's needs, do we cease to be gods? Do we cease to be Christ's? The answer is yes, we do. So what's the next step and that is where we talk about progression and we create and have our own world such as this with people that we can nurture and take care of and devote our whole lives to. I think the first time in my life even going through my mission and everything else where I truly felt what Joseph Smith said when he said we were becoming like gods, when we were willing to give up and take upon us the sins of another person in hopes that they gain eternal life. When my grandfather passed away, he struggled his life to live the laws the way that we would think and for the first time in my life I knelt down and I prayed and I asked the Lord to let me suffer for his sins so that he could live in eternity of happiness. That is joyous taxation. And that's what I present to you through the MTA. Thank you. It seems often in the LDS church when we talk about the idea of taxation in government, a lot of people have the view that well in this life it's great to have a free market but in the next life will be in some kind of communism but it'll be okay because it'll be voluntary. And my feeling is that we actually need more regulation in this life because there's a tendency to be abusive whereas in a celestial society you could have free market with less regulation. And one of the things I was thinking about is you said that you think, you would like to see a society that doesn't have currency, understand that right? But currency isn't that a pretty efficient way to represent what is valuable to each individual person and how would you have a society without some kind of a symbol like that to trade and maximize everyone's joy I guess. I think you present, I think there's several questions and commentaries there. First of all, I find it disturbing and also unproductive to talk and communicate to each other about one day Jesus will come and everything will be good, right? And I think that that's one of the things that gets brought down into Mormonism that hurts us is that and that's why I love the MTA is we talk about a proactive creation of the millennium. We are creating the society that we want. As far as the currency goes, when I say currency, I mean pieces of paper that designate success that are so easily and artificially creating power and wealth. If we revert back to the dark ages or the old ages, you had currency in the form of what you find valuable as pelts or food or chocolate or whatever became of value. And currency I think can be, I mean I haven't put as much thought as maybe you would have liked that I did into this next aspect but currency is love and charity, kindness. If that's what's traded, we can expect to receive back that which we give, consideration, that can be our currency. If that's what's important to us, then that could be our currency. I mean I listened to that Ted broadcast the atheism 2.0 and he kind of talked about some similar concepts behind that what is valuable to us will be that which we trade and we give back even without the idea of God. Anyway, I wish I would have thought about it more but that's my answer.


Hi everyone, my name is Ivan Sim. I'm an open-source software engineer at Kaston. Today I'd like to share with you an open-source project by Kaston called Kennister. Kennister is a software that you can install on your Kubernetes clusters and use it to protect data persisted by your stateful applications. We're going to start off with an introduction into what is data protection. Then we're going to take a look at Kennister and what Kennister can do for you. Then we're going to dive straight into demo. After the demo, I will be sharing some project opportunities that some of you might find interesting and relevant. Some of you may be familiar with the data protection working group. That working group is part of the Kubernetes 6 storage. Last year the group published a white paper on data protection workflow. In the paper, the group defines data protection workflow as a process to protect valuable data and configuration of stateful applications running on Kubernetes. The result of the workflow is typically something called a backup. A backup is an artifact that you can use to restore your stateful applications back to the state or the checkpoint defined by the backup. The paper goes into more details with examples on why data protection is important and necessary for Kubernetes. So if data protection is something that you think about a lot, I encourage you to take a look at the white paper. So while I talk about data protection today, why bother? In 2021, CNCF survey reported that 64.69% of the respondents said that they are currently running stateful applications in containers in production Kubernetes. Considering the number of organizations running Kubernetes in production today, this is not a small number. Now if you are part of the 64.69%, you may have noticed that the data protection architecture, specifically toolings and solutions around backing and restoring data, hasn't been keeping in pace with the rest of the cloud native ecosystem, and we want to change that. The third reason why we want to talk about data protection today is as we all know, Kubernetes provides a set of common APIs for development, operation and security teams to manage resources and enforce policy efficiently. We believe that data protection toolings and solutions shouldn't be managed differently. They should all be part of the cloud native ecosystem. We have chances to talk to many of our users to try to understand their pain points around snapshotting and backing up data. The one thing that always comes back revolves around the different requirements, the different flavors and the different varieties of strategies and mechanisms to capture snapshots, backups and data dumps. For example, if you are someone who works closely with Cloud Provider API, you may already have scripts that capture snapshots of your virtual volumes. That's great, but snapshots captured at that volumes offers only crash-consistent backup. In other words, only data that has been returned to the disk is included in the snapshot. In memory data, pending transactions, they are not included as part of the snapshot. If you are someone who works closely with data services and databases, you may already have custom pre-imposed hooks that are run prior to the snapshot operation. Going further down the stack, you might depend on specific database utility tools such as MySQL Dump or PG Dump or Monco Dump to capture data dump of your databases. All of these tools require direct access into the container where the database processes are run. What about the application as a whole? The configurations and secrets that your microservices may depend on that are not part of your databases. Overall, there are way too many options and way too many moving parts. If you imagine yourself being a barista, it's like trying to have to manage and remember all these different recipes and ingredients that you are required to put together, the different coffee types that your customers may ask of you. This is where we hope canister can fit in. We are hoping that canister can bring some order and coherence into your data protection strategy. Canister is an open source project by Castin as I mentioned earlier. It is implemented as a Kubernetes controller. It exposes a set of cohesive APIs in the form of custom resource definitions. And user use these APIs to define and curate data protection workloads. Canister is also extensible. We have community members who have been publishing and sharing the blueprints for their data sources, as well as extending canister with custom canister functions. So terminologies like blueprints and canister functions, they will become clearer during the demo. Canister exposes three main APIs. At the highest level, we have blueprint. Blueprint is a template of collection of instructions. It tells the controller of canister how to perform specific actions on specific application. For example, I can have a blueprint that contains and defines backup and restore actions for my Postgres database. I can have another blueprint for my MongoDB, another blueprint for my Cassandra services. The second API is ActionSet. We can all think of ActionSet as this runtime trigger execution point or entry point that tells canister to go find a specific blueprint and execute a specific action within the blueprint and supply the function with a set of input parameters. The last API is Profile. Profile abstracts away the details around interacting with remote repository, specifically used to store backup artifacts. Some of you may be familiar with the 321 data backup rules. One of the rules says that at least one copy of your backup should be exported to a remote location. Profile abstracts away the details of working with those remote repositories. Let's go straight into the demo. We will be using an EKS cluster. I have pre-installed a Postgres database on the cluster. The part has a PVC and a PV attached to it and is backed by an actual EBS volume. On the right side of this diagram, you see that during the demo, I'll be using canister to manage the CSI volume snapshot and volume snapshot content and resources to create and manage the actual EBS snapshots. The flow of the demo is pretty simple. We're going to start off with using a tool called Cubester to discover and verify our volume provisioners and the different CSI storage solutions on our cluster. Then we're going to go ahead and deploy our Postgres footprint, and from there we'll dive into specific individual actions that first of all creates a volume snapshot for my Postgres database and then invoke the EBS API to list all the snapshots. Then finally to restore the volume snapshot to a new PVC. So let's switch over to my terminal. In this demo, I'll be using a script to automate the typing. Otherwise we are targeting a real live EKS cluster. The first command I want to run is to use kubectl to confirm that I am indeed working with the right EKS cluster. So great. Now we're going to use Cubester to discover and verify the volume provisioners and the CSI solutions on our clusters. Cubester is another open source project by Casting.  In parallel, there's also a collection of out of three CSI drivers. So Cubester was able to discover that my cluster has an EBS CSI driver installed. It also provides some helpful commands to allow me to run subsequent checks to confirm that my CSI driver is indeed healthy and working correctly. Cubester also discovers that there is an entry EBS volume provisioner that comes with my Kubernetes cluster. So for the rest of this demo, we will be using the EBS CSI driver to create volume snapshot and to restore the data. As I mentioned earlier, I have a Postgres database installed. So let's make sure it is up and running. This Postgres database is also preceded with some test data. And this is the data that we will be snapshotting and restoring in the rest of this demo. So in my database, I have a table called Sessions. And within Sessions, I have three rows of data. Great. So now let's go ahead and install Canister on my EKS cluster. So installing Canister is very straightforward. We use Helm. So Helm install is the command that we use. And commonly, Helm upgrade and Helm uninstall is all you need to manage Canister. Let's take a look at our controller part. Great. It's healthy and up and running. As you can see, it doesn't take long for the Canister operator to be ready. Just let's go ahead and deploy our Postgres Blueprint. So up till now, we haven't had a chance to look at what the Blueprint is. And we're going to do that right now. Fair warning, there will be quite a bit of YAML. So our Postgres Blueprint is called CSI-snapshots. And inside this Blueprint, we have three main actions. The first action we're going to look at is called Create Snapshot. So a Blueprint has a number of actions. And each action has a number of faces. What we are seeing here is that the Create Snapshot action is made out of two faces. The first face basically says, before creating the snapshot, set the database to read-only mode. And once the database is in read-only mode, call this built-in Create CSI Snapshot function. This is what we call a Canister function. It is backed by some Go code. And behind the scene, it just relies on the client Go SDK to make HTTP requests to the Kubernetes CSI volumes snapshot endpoint. In addition to faces, we also recently added something called a defer face. You can think of a defer face as that always run final face. So regardless of what happened to previous faces, this face will always be run at the end. If you're familiar with Go, this is very similar to the Go defer statement. So this defer face says, whatever happens previously, always reset the database back to read-right mode. So put things back to how we found it before. Now the next action I want to show in the same Blueprint is the Restore Snapshot action. See that the Restore Snapshot action is actually a lot simpler. It has only one face and it relies on this Restore CSI Snapshot Canister function. It is expecting a number of input parameters. So later I will show how we can use the output from the Create Snapshot action and feed that into the Restore Snapshot action as input parameters. The final action that we want to look at is called the Describe Snapshot. So in this face, in this action, I'm actually using the AWS CLI to communicate with the AWS EC2 endpoint and assets to list a set of snapshots that have just been created. The point of this action is to show that Canister worked well with Kubernetes API. It also works really well with Remote Cloud Provider API as long as the proper secrets and credentials are provided. So let's go ahead and create an action set. So as I mentioned earlier, an action set is that runtime execution trigger point or entry point. This is what the YAML of the Create Snapshot action set looks like. It's basically providing information on what action to run and where the blueprint is and then also a set of input parameters that will be fed into the Canister function. I'm going to go ahead and use kubectl to create this action set. Now we're going to watch the CSI Volume Snapshot and Volume Snapshot content resources being created. So by simply creating an action set for the Create Snapshot action, we can see that how Canister is able to talk to the Volume Snapshot APIs and create the resources accordingly. So it looks like our Volume Snapshot resources and Volume Snapshot content is ready. So Kubernetes thinks that our snapshots are ready. Is it really? So what we're going to do next is to utilize the Describe Snapshot action and use it to call the AWS API to confirm that we indeed have the EBS snapshots created in the cloud. So what we did here was that we parse the status of resource of the Describe Snapshot action for information that was returned from the AWS EBS API. As you can see, we get information around the actual Snapshot ID and the Volume ID. So great! Our EBS snapshots are truly created. And the last stage of this demo is to really take that newly created CSI Snapshot and restore it to a new Postgres database. We'll be using a tool called CanCTL. So instead of creating the restore action set YAML as some static YAML, we actually use a tool called CanCTL to read the output from the previous Create Snapshot action set and pipe that into KubeCuddle and use that to create our restore action set resource. So as you can see with that action set being applied, we now have a new PVC restore to the same namespace that my original Postgres database is running in. The status of this PVC will remain pending because, by default, the storage class that we are using has the binding policy set to wait for a first consumer. In other words, the PV will not be bounded to the PVC until a part, an application, is actually available and start consuming the PVC. So the rest of this demo is really to just install a new Postgres database to be managed by another stateful set workload and tell the stateful set to pick up the restore PVC instead of creating a new one. So this will take a couple of seconds for the new Postgres part to be ready. The first part here is the original part where we captured the Snapshot form and the second part here, as you can tell, is the restore Postgres part. Okay, it looks like it's ready. And the final command that we're going to run is really just to use KubeCuddle exact and exact into the restore Postgres database and make sure our sessions table have been restored with the three test data roles we have inserted earlier. And there it is. And with that, we have reached the end of our demo. As I mentioned earlier, Canister is an open source project. If backup and restore is something that you have to deal with a lot, I encourage you to check out Canister. Source code is on GitHub. Feel free to join us on Slack. I'm always there answering questions and talking to you about your use case. Join our community meeting. We meet every other Thursday at 6 in the hour at UTC. We have some exciting roadmap coming up and feedback and contributions are most welcome. Thank you so much for your time. Cheers.


in Wisconsin, a little west of Milwaukee on I-94. Now we gotta go through Milwaukee down to Racine, I almost called it Washington again, Racine, Wisconsin. Unload our freight, go down to Illinois, I believe. I still haven't gotten confirmation on that next load. I was told I'll be going down to Illinois, grabbing a load going to Ontario, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. It's empty and we're gonna have to clean it out before we get to our next customer. We gotta go all the way down to Arthur, Illinois and that's about four and a half hours away, so we'll stop on the way. I gotta get a coffee anyways, we'll clean this out on the way. You can never leave your trailer like this though, just saying, okay? Before you unhook and leave it somewhere, make sure it's swept out and clean, everything put away. So we're not gonna leave it like this, okay? Just for a bit, we gotta get out of this parking lot here. Gotta get out of everyone else's way here. I'm not in the way right now, but they're gonna be finished soon and then I will be in the way, so I don't have the time to sweep it out and stuff here. Not a big deal. As long as you always remember, clean it out. Sweep it out, always. Even if it doesn't look like it needs sweeping, just give it a quick sweep, do something. Always remember, try to leave everything better than you found it. And if you found it super clean, return it super clean. Okay. Moral of the story. Okay, we're going to Arthur, Illinois now. I need to find a coffee somewhere and breakfast. I haven't eaten yet. Let's get going. We're all walked in. This way, I do believe. So I just got my, oh, I'm still in driving.  So I figured it was best to just stop here and figure out what they wanted. So I have a new load coming out of Arthur, Illinois into Ontario, just like I said. I'll take you off my head so we can talk face to face. I have a big mark here now, don't I? From the camera, that's why I wear this. Now you know. So when Arthur, Illinois, we have eight drops. It starts in London, Ontario and ends off in Dorval, Quebec, which I think is around Ottawa. I go through Ottawa and end off in Dorval, Quebec. So it should be good to get paid for each of those drops. So these loads usually paid pretty well. I get paid for the miles to go there, plus each drop. Turns out to be quite a fair, quite a fair payment, I think. I like it anyways, I'm happy with it. So let's go pick up our load and start meandering our way towards the Canadian border. We're gonna be crossing from Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario. Okay, just real quickly here. I wanna find out how far away... So many Londons. London, Ontario, how far away is it from Arthur, Illinois? Arthur makes me think of that cartoon of that little moose guy. You guys remember that, Arthur? What's this theme song again? I used to always have it in my head. I better not think of it or it'll be in my head again. Oh, it's only 871 kilometers. That's not even that far. Let's do the math for my American friends. You wonderful people in your weird systems of measurement divided by 1.61, 540.9, 541 miles. That's just the Dave driving. Cool, so we got time, we got time. Look at this beautiful picture. Look at this, look, I gotta show this to you, look at this. That beautiful picture on my background. That gives me motivation to get home. Okay, let's get out of here. Diesel, you good? All right, cool. And then that way, and then back over that way. Where'd you come from, buddy? Always look twice, guys. Look twice, look twice. Snuck up on me. So this is Racine, Wisconsin. I know at least one of you live here because I read your comments saying that this is your hometown. It's very nice. It's not even fall here yet. Look at these trees, they're all perfectly green, except for those ones. They're dead. I wonder if I'm passing by your place. Diesel, what do you think? Very nice town, eh? We could have stayed here for night, but I didn't know, right? I didn't know. All I knew is it was between Milwaukee and Kenosha, so I don't know what neighborhoods to avoid. All I know is that at night, sometimes, sometimes you just don't wanna be there. Things get a little too peaceful for me. What do you think, Diesel? Karen's telling me to go this way. You okay with that? You're the navigator, man. I have a tight corner here. Nice. Gonna hit the curb. Like a boss. Like a boss. And I gotta turn left right away so I'm gonna stay in the left lane. Judge me. I don't care. Oh, you smoke a row in his man. There's a dog over there. There's a dog. A real one, man. I saw him, Diesel. He's not on a leash either. He's a very good boy. I know, right? Risky. At a truck stop, at the fuel pumps, with trucks moving all around here. A very busy truck stop. Doesn't have his dog on a leash. Diesel, I love you. But it's because I love you that I would never let that happen with you. When there's moving trucks all around here, he is on the leash. It's for his own safety and my peace of mind. Yeah, I was just letting his dog run around all the trucks here. Trucks are backing up, driving all over the place, parking, fueling. But nothing happened. So, like Diesel said, he's a very good boy. Good thing. Time to go clean out the trailer. We gotta get this done before we drop it. You hear this? He brings his line and got some leaks. First thing you do, maybe don't whack it. Just tap it even on there. That doesn't sound like it's working. I can still hear it leaking. Okay, so what you do next after that, don't hit that thing too hard. Just tap it, just try to get these two circles, the seals. I was just trying to get them lined up properly, right? Don't go, I was just joking. Don't go and whack it, all right?  Don't do that. All right, so what you do then, pull that out so that it's not charged anymore. Okay, and you go back out here. Can you see? Maybe I should move you over a little bit. How about that? That's better, right? All right, take it off. You check the seals. You can see here what the problem was. You see that seal in there? That seal is not gonna seal if it's sucked in there. Not good, okay. Now it's on there. Check the glad hand. Oh, this one's doing the same thing. You see that? Pull that out of there. Come on now. That's hard to do with one hand. All right, pull that out of there. There you go, see? That should seal a lot better. Now sometimes it still doesn't seal properly, even though you fixed the rings.  I'll tell you a little trick. It works best when something doesn't work as good in really cold weather, but you can give it a shot. It always works for me. If you still can't get a proper seal, and this is just a little bit old, you don't have a replacement one on you, put a little spit on it, okay? This probably sounded like much better advice before the sickness, but it works. It'll spit on it, and wipe it around on it, make it wet, okay? You don't want to use spit, maybe you can use some water. I've never tried water, but spits always work. All right, if it doesn't work after you whack it with a hammer, spit on it. Trucker Josh, a wealth of knowledge. Good, you spread that around, and it actually seals it better. It's worked every time for me, but we're not gonna do that now. Let's see if this fixes the problem just by fixing the seal. All right, let's see, let's see. Gotta make sure it's properly lined up, okay? We're gonna recharge the brakes again. That did it, okay? So all we had to do was realign those seals. That worked. No spit necessary today. No more leaks. All good. So let's do the rest of our preach up here in the trailer. Make sure that all the lights work and that the tires are filled with air and have no holes in them. You can see the signal here, and marker light working. Fantastico, kick the tires just to make sure that they have air in them that they're not deflated or flat, as some might say. Marker light here is on, ABS light is off. Fantastic. All right, signals work. Wait for the truck to put on the brake lights. There they are, brake lights. The other side is good too. So last time I showed you this, some of you asked how do I get the brake lights to come on like that? It's actually a feature on these Peterbilts that we have. You push a little button on the dashboard and it circulates or cycles through the lights all around the truck and trailer. It shows you if the high beams are working, low beams, signals, marker lights, brake lights. It does all that for you. So as you walk around, all you gotta do is just look at all the lights. You don't have to, you know, pin the breakdown or anything. It does it for you. It's a nice feature on these new trucks. You see, it does it with the high beams here that turns off the high beams as well and the signals makes it a lot easier for us. All right, boys and girls, we're ready to rock. Let's just do our quick little tug test here. Spike the brakes. Trailer is attached and it's not going to fall off. Okay, here we go. We're all sealed up. Jumping another trailer. We're headed towards Windsor, Ontario and Detroit. Won't make it there tonight. We only got another three hours and seven minutes available to us. See how far we get. Perfect temperature to go trucking. A lot of Amish people around this area. I'm gonna let you know. They can be cool to spend like a week on an Amish farm, Amish farm, Amish, Amish. They can be fun. What an interesting lifestyle, right? Horses diesel. You see that? All of the stores here in town also have Amish parking for their horses. I'm not sure if you'll be able to see it here or not. They all have this, what do you call it again? That little post, like here, on the right there.   That's awesome. I'm serious. I think the Amish sort of are on to something, you know? I think they're on to something. There's more over here. A simple lifestyle. And you know, when everything goes up in smoke, the Amish aren't even gonna really notice. They'll be just fine. Totally self-sufficient. They don't use electricity. They don't use fossil fuels for the most part. Most of them don't. They ride around a horse and buggy. I mean, when the oil runs out, the Amish are gonna be laughing because we're all gonna be running to them for help. Pretty cool and pretty neat communities. They're actually cousins of ours. My longtime viewers know that. I have Mennonite heritage. The Amish are sort of distant cousins of ours. We branch off from the same people's way back when. They're sort of like our extremists, you know? Here's some more coming up on the right here. I like to just slowly glide past them so I don't spook the horses, but I think these horses are pretty much impossible to spook at this point, you know? They're so used to it. Oh, is that diesel? Isn't that cool? I know, we need to get one of those. There's actually a new pretty large Amish colony that has been set up not too far away from us, just south of Steinbeck. They came from Southern Ontario. I guess their colonies there were branching out and a whole bunch of them moved out to Manitoba. I left on. I are 133. So they have a big colony around Vita. And you can always tell if it's an Amish farm because there's no electric lines leading to the houses or buildings. They don't use electricity, like I was saying. It's interesting lifestyle. Yeah, we've got a whole bunch of them in our region now and they're very good, very hardworking people. Well, Diesel, that's it for today. I guess it's time to hang the hat up and not put the hat back on. It's it for today. We went about another hour down the road to a town called Champagne, I believe. Let me just double check for you. Where am I? Hey! Hey! Somebody tell me where I am. Champagne, yep. Champagne, Illinois. We're at a little truck stop here called, it's a road ranger. It's at Exit, what is this? Exit 240 on I-57. I'm gonna spend the night here tonight and continue tomorrow. So if you did like the video, the best way you can help me if you feel like it is like the video. Leave a comment down below, engage with the video. That way YouTube recommends it to more new people. If you are new, subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss the next video. We make a video every day. Tomorrow will be another one as we head towards Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Anything else you wanna add, Diesel? Here's your dog, bang. I think it's a dog, it might be a rat. I'm not sure. I don't know, maybe it's a cat, maybe it's a rat. He's really weird. This guy got out of his truck here and he had two, what looked like, piglets. Diesel thinks they're rats or cats. They did look like rats, sort of, but I think that they were piglets. I think he had two piglets. He was walking around right out in front of the truck here. I couldn't tell what they were. Oh, he wasn't that far away either. There he is, the guy just running, and they followed him everywhere.  He was the funniest thing ever. And he tossed him onto the ground like a cat, like from waist level. He was carrying him and he just tossed him on the ground and landed on their feet and just... I have no idea what that was, Diesel. Diesel was very, very concerned. He said, I am not gonna sleep now, man. I need to know what that was. You see the sweat? It could be a threat, Diesel. I don't know. You'll have to figure that out yourself. That's your job, right? That's what they pay you the big bucks for. Yes, it was big, big bucks, yes. Man, we spoil you, man. We get you the high quality food. We get you daily supplements, salmon oil. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.  You do a good job, man. So let's call it a night here. This video is probably getting pretty long already. You guys have had a smudge on you this whole time. There's a fingerprint right there. Nice.  You filthy, filthy. There you go. Nice and clean. Okay, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you tomorrow.


This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org, here with SiliconANGLE TV's live continuous coverage from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. And joining me for this segment is Scott Lowe. Scott's other Scott Lowe on Twitter. He is an author. He is the founder and managing contributor of the 1610 group, and he's also a contributor of the wikibon community. So Scott, first time on theCUBE, welcome. Thank you, I'm happy to be here still. Great, so what we try to do on theCUBE here is we find the smartest people we can find out there. I mean, we try to extract the signal from the noise and share with the community what's going on. And you are one of those great community sharers. As I said, you've written for, it was like CVS multimedia, kind of the ZD net stuff. You're working with us at wikibon. You've written a couple of books. And really from an expertise standpoint, some of the things we're going to talk about today is Microsoft. Yes, we're here at VMware Show, but we're going to talk a little bit about Microsoft. Flash, VDI, and some of the other transformations going on here. So first of all, have you been to VMworld before? I have, this is actually only my second VMworld, but it's a great show. There's so much here. It's bigger than the last one I was at, by far. So, and this year you were actually named a VMware vExpert? For the first time, yes. So congratulations, but you've been a Microsoft MVP for how many years? I have actually never been an MVP. Oh, really? I have not. Okay, so just that you've written a bunch of books. That's okay. So if we look at the discussion of VMware, one of the underlying back discussions is, VMware dominates in the hypervisor market today, but we've been talking for the last couple of years is, is Microsoft closing the gap? Is it good enough? Does the ecosystem need to partner with more than one? And we just had HP on, and HP is hypervisor agnostic. We're going to do multiple hypervisors. You go to some of the Microsoft shows like TechEd and everything. You've been doing some writing on kind of the latest of Hyper-V. So where is Microsoft in the hypervisor market? What's your lay of the land for VMware and Microsoft? Yeah, as I look at where we are today and where we're headed, I see Microsoft is very much a force to be reckoned with and something that VMware's going to have to make sure that they're able to counter in some effective way. In fact, I wrote an article recently for Wikibon and have some stats that show that of the respondents that responded to a survey by Wikibon, we had 57% of the respondents were running more than one hypervisor. All of them were running VMware, but another 57% or a majority of them were actually running a second hypervisor and the hypervisor that was in the lead in the secondary spotless hyper-V. As we see with Hyper-V 2012 coming out from a feature by feature perspective, it significantly closes the gap with vSphere. So I think we're going to see a lot of competition for Microsoft. The war of marketing, the war of words is already escalating. There's a lot of marketing collateral being released and there's a lot of testing going on. Of course, hyper-V has not actually GA'd yet. Hyper-V3, can you say? Hyper-V3 has not actually GA'd yet. So the proof is in the pudding. We'll see what happens once it GA's and what kind of uptake it gets, but there's a lot of interest out there about hyper-V. So Scott, I want to poke for a second at what we call kind of the multi-hypervisor environment. So you've been a CIO before. And what you tend to give from a viewpoint is what should CIOs do? The discussion point we've had in data centers for a while now is the difference between kind of like the pure cloud environments like the Googles and the Facebooks, they only have a couple of applications and they have a homogeneous environment. And the mess of the enterprise is because we have silos and multiple vendors and everything else like that. So should customers standardize on a single hypervisor? Why are they doing multi-hypervisors? Is it a good or a bad idea in your opinion? It really depends on the situation.  They may run hyper-V in some test beds, you may see developers running hyper-V, particularly once we see the next wave of windows hit because you're gonna see hyper-V built into the client now. I think that's gonna help push hyper-V a little bit as a secondary hypervisor for many organizations. And it may help drive it into the enterprise a little bit, but those large organizations are running workloads that might not necessarily translate well to hyper-V. So they're running VMware because it's a much, much broader platform from a support perspective than hyper-V is currently. Whether that's good or bad really depends on if it's able to be supported. If the organization's meeting its business goals, great. Pick the solution that makes the most sense from that perspective. It really depends on the dollars and cents and the solution that's gonna work. So a lot of it does come down to the dollars and cents. If you look at kind of the open source environments, it's kind of free hypervisors. Many people have said really that the hypervisor is commoditized today. You've looked really closely at hyper-V. Is there a lot of air gap between kind of a standard, kind of the essentials plus VMware versus hyper-V or has Microsoft closed the gap? With hyper-V three, Microsoft has closed the gap in a number of significant ways. From a scalability perspective, it rivals VMware at this point. So when you talk about that monster VM, hyper-V can support the monster VM these days. When you look at some of the enterprise-grade features that are necessary in a hypervisor, particularly no downtime, live migrations and things like that, whereas Microsoft did not generally have an answer for that in the past. With hyper-V three, those issues go away. In fact, they've been really trying to push the envelope on some of those features in the recent release of hyper, or the recent, the coming release of hyper-V, I'm sorry. And you're going to see some of these things like shared nothing live migration, like what was introduced in vSphere 5.1 yesterday. So we're starting to see, I think the competition is good for both VMware and Microsoft and ultimately good for the customer. Yeah, no, that's great commentary, Scott, because VMotion has been, for the last decade, really that kind of secret sauce, kind of the premium functionality that they do, that they kind of pull customers in for. So that's interesting. So should VMware be scared of Microsoft? What have you heard at the show here? Is this a response to Microsoft? What they're doing? Are they still kind of the dominant lead dog, or are you seeing things from the elimination of the VRAM or VTACs? Is that a response to Microsoft and kind of the threat that they see from below? I do believe that's actually a response to Microsoft. Obviously, it was introduced last year, it was incredibly unpopular. I think it was, frankly, quite a mistake based on earlier guidance that customers have gotten from VMware. And it was also a marketing tool that Microsoft could bludgeon VMware to death with. They've effectively eliminated a marketing tool for Microsoft, and that's good for VMware. But if you look at it from a direct cost perspective, Hyper-V is still a free hypervisor, and it has all of the enterprise features that you're going to find, and even an enterprise plus skew these days from VMware, including a virtual distributed switch, all of the live migration features, the high availability features. Now, they're not quite as smooth as they are in vSphere, but they are there, and I think that you're going to see a lot of Seattle start to say, what am I paying for when I can just have something maybe not quite as smooth, but this still does what I need to be able to do to get business done. Great, so fascinating stuff. Look forward to more writing from you on kind of the Microsoft piece. I'd like to transition a little over to the end user computing or BDI space. So while in the hypervisor, all the discussion is usually about VMware versus Microsoft and VDI, it's Citrix has been the lead dog there, certain advanced functionality Citrix has had, in many ways VMware has closed the gap, and Microsoft has partnered with Citrix for a lot of these solutions. So what's your take on VDI? Did you happen to catch the keynote this morning? How's VMware doing, and what do you see in the VDI marketplace? Well, and VDI has been one of these, it's almost a unicorn in some respects to get the perfect VDI solution as a former CIO when I first started looking at VDI, I was looking at it very much from a cost perspective. I wanted to figure out a way to get out of the endless desktop replacement lifecycle that we were always in every five years replacing PCs just to replace them. But with VDI, we were able to start thinking about leaving those endpoints out there and redirecting our funds into really making the core a great place to be, and then basically just having endpoints, kind of return to the mainframe days. But as time's gone on, the economics have not necessarily worked out for all, if you're not trying to do VDI to save money, you're doing it wrong basically, up until recently at least. Yeah, one of the things in the keynote that got a good chuckle, especially across the Twitterverse is, one of the ways that you can lower the cost of VDI is through BYOD, bring your own desktop, or as VMware put out, it's S-Y-O-M, spend your own money. Exactly.  I see BYOD and VDI as interlinked. I think that's what will actually drive VDI more than anything. It won't be the necessary, the cost savings that come with it from the enterprise as the primary driver, but it'll be to satisfy those BYOD wishes that we're seeing rise these days, because IT can still deploy and provision standard desktop, so no matter what the device. And that's what really we want to see in IT, is as much standardization as we can to make things easy to support, make it easy to train users, keep our costs down, so that things are a bit repeatable. Yeah, is there anything from the Microsoft side about VDI that's coming out in that new release that we should know about? We're gonna see a lot of remote effects enhancements, that's Microsoft's answer to Teradici's PCOIP. Beyond that, I haven't researched enough yet to be able to tell you exactly what other VDI enhancements are coming, but they are coming. I know that they've done a lot with remote effects, they're putting their money where their mouth is, and making remote effects a first rate protocol. All right, so the last topic I think we want to cover is Flash. So, it kind of joked, in the storage industry, Flash is the savior of the universe, the old classic Queen song. So, you've looked a lot at Flash, it's one of these discussion points that when you talk about refresh cycles, our CIO's saying, is this something that I just kind of add to my existing environment, or do I go a brand new architecture, do I have a specific application for Fusion IO, or violin, or am I looking at some of these new hybrid or all Flash arrays? You did what we believe it's called the CIO primer on solid state storage, up on the Wikibon site, free research that you can go find, if you just Google Wikibon CIO primer solid state storage, you'll find it easier, go to wikibon.org. So, what did you find in this study, and what's your advice for CIOs looking at Flash? You know, one of the things that, I want to mention something I saw here at the show, regardless of Flash, the storage market is represented well here at VMworld. I mean, I believe that every other booth is potentially a storage player at this show, which tells you that basically virtualization and storage are inextricably linked to one another. But what we're seeing in the Flash market is a lot of players taking advantage of the revolution that's coming in storage. From a CIO perspective, when you look at what's next, again, it's going to depend on workload.  But if you're looking at a general company that just needs to do day-to-day work, I believe the hybrid players are really going to be a sweet spot for many CIOs. They have the advantage of having high IOPS for those workloads that require it, but also be able to have high capacity to be able to store the data that's necessary from a capacity perspective in organizations. Yeah, so Flash is a technology, but how do companies approach this? Is it the line of business that says, I have this research application that I can't meet what I need? How does it kind of come into the environment organizationally, where do you see it fitting and kind of playing out? If an organization is right appropriately, it's going to be a partnership between the business and IT to determine what is necessary. The business is going to tell IT, here's what we require, and somebody's going to research that project and figure out what's necessary. And I see basically the business demanding particular applications, and then IT saying, okay, we can meet that need, we're going to need to deploy either an all Flash or a hybrid Flash array in order to meet the performance requirements that you have for that particular application. Obviously, there's also the cloud that comes into that. There may be a cloud provider that can provide those services instead, but it really needs to be thought through well to ensure that the ultimate outcomes are met from a business perspective.  So, obviously, Wikibon done a lot in the big data space. You know, you've come more, we're usually writing about the infrastructure side.  So, you know, for infrastructure folks, kind of like you and me, with our background, you know, what does this big data mean to you and how should CIOs and companies be looking at it in your mind?  I got to make sure that I'm provisioning the storage that can meet the massive IOPS that are going to be necessary in order to support these huge data sets that crunching these huge data sets, the compute load and the IOPS load. And I got to make sure that I'm building solutions that will also meet the capacity requirements. And obviously we're seeing some other players actually join this space to help in that effort. Companies like Cloud Physics are helping make sure that we're sizing our applications appropriately to meet the workload needs in our environment. So, as from a CIO perspective, those are the kind of places I'd be turning to these days to help me size my environment appropriately for the coming wave of big data applications. Yeah, I mean, Scott, you mentioned Cloud Physics. You know, one of the things I love coming to VMworld is there's so many startups. So, Cloud Physics just came out of stealth. I managed to go to an event last night. They had, you know, Mendel, the guy who, you know, created VMware there. So, it was phenomenal to see some of the startups and brilliant people here. You've been walking around the show. Any kind of cool technologies are interesting. You know, what's on your follow-up research list that you say, I saw this and I really want to dig into it after either technology or, you know, any cool companies you've seen? One of my goals is to continue to expand and scale the flash primer. So, I've actually been visiting with a lot of the flash companies to learn more about them so I can make that resource as valuable as possible for the Wikibon community. So, that's actually where I put a lot of my focus is on the storage vendors. Okay, great. Yeah, yesterday we actually had, you know, quite a lot of them on from, we had a new startup called Proximal Data. It was on early in the morning. Software based solution, Fusion IO was on and had two panels, one of hybrids and one of all flash. So, we'll probably make sure you got those videos linked in the article that you posted. So, Scott, I'll just, any other final comments that you want to add? It's kind of your VMworld experience, you know, here. It's been a great show. I'll tell you, I was thrilled to hear the end of VRAM yesterday. I think the applause was all that was necessary. I think VMware's taking the right steps to counter the coming Microsoft threat and it's obvious that we're moving beyond the data center in a lot of different ways. And this show is proof of that, it's just by walking around the trade show floor. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Scott, thank you for sharing your CIO viewpoint to the user community out here. Absolutely some, you know, critical things that CIOs and all companies need to look at.  You want to make sure that, you know, the advancements and the vision isn't, you know, kind of overrun by things like licensing and pricing and all these other things which are just going to drive customers away. So, you can find Scott at Other Scott Low on Twitter. You can also find a lot of his writing on wikibon.org. Any other, whatever else should we go? I believe you've got your own website that we should. I do, I have an aggregate website of all my writing at CIOscape.com and my business website is at 1610group.com. All right, so Scott, thank you so much for joining us. This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org and we'll be right back with our next guest here at VMworld 2012.