Llywodraeth chi ddim yn ei achos me firingo gael, a dw i'n niech chi ddigon y ffordd. Rydw i fawr i chi'ch gwaith o' chyflodydd cymryd diolch. A ddigon i chi'ch ei gwneud ei ddweud. Rydw i chi yna'r llwydd George Bamboo ac i chi. Rydw i chi'n gweithio. Gwaith bod yn cwm regulator gyda'r hyn? Charlie Bronson's son. You were on last year. Charlie Fond gave a little 15 minute squeal about his life. Mad story, like he's got a DNA test in prison, confirmed it's your son. He's up for parole now, but first and foremost, how are you? Yeah, I'm all right. Been a bit of a tricky time in the last few weeks. We just did a big documentary on Channel 4, two-parter, something that me and Charlie have been working on together for three years or so. I've come on the show to sort of tell you a few home truths and a few facts because this documentary that we just did, me and Charlie ended up having a big fallout at the end of it because basically what it was, well I'll tell you what, I'll go to the beginning shall I? Shall I start the story at the beginning?  You know, they don't know what they're talking about, the majority of them. I've had many many thousands of people sending me really positive messages and stuff about Charlie, but what people don't realise is some of the things that they say online, they're saying where they're completely ill-educated about what's been going on. So I thought the times come for me to reveal who I actually am and what I actually do.  I mean there's people out there, we know our phones, we like 400 like subscribers that think the big podcasters that just talking shite all the time about mine and Charlie's relationship. So I'm going to put it to bed. Basically many years ago, six years ago, I did a documentary on TV on Channel 4. I had my own TV series. I also had loads of businesses, retired, self-sufficient, all the rest of it. So during the course of my life I've been working as a paparazzi and I've been working as an investigative journalist on quite a few occasions with a lot of the papers as an undercover reporter. So, as a result of my TV show on Channel 4, which was Confession to the Paparazzi, Paula Williamson got in touch with me and I got a message on Twitter or whatever it was. Just said, hi George, I'm Charlie Bronson's fiance, Paula.  And she said, Charles Bronson wants you to come and visit him. So I said, oh right, okay. I was like, Charles Bronson the prisoner, I'd be interested. Why does he want me to see him? And she said, he's seen you on the telly.  I said, right, all right, I'll go and see him. Started all the situation rolling. I went down to Stoke to meet Paula. Absolutely lovely woman, got on really well with her. I got the impression straight away all she was interested in was fame and all the rest of it.  She's a lovely person, got on really well with her. So then we went through all the paperwork and I was waiting to get approved to go to the prison to visit Charlie. Now obviously, I'm a reporter, I work for the press, that's what I've done all my life. I've also got lots of other businesses. So when I got involved with the paperwork to fill in with the home office to go and visit him, the police had to come around to the house to visit me, see who I was, make sure I wasn't going to try and spring him out of prison or whatever. So I told them that I had loads of furniture shops and that's what I did for a living. And I was interested in Charles Bronson the team on the telly, blah blah blah and all this. So the police went off, filled all the reports in. Meanwhile, Charlie started sending me loads of letters, George Bambi King of the Paparazzi and all this and whatever, looking forward to seeing you and everything. So I went down to Wakefield Prison for the first visit and I went with Paula.  That's how he was portrayed. I've never met him before. So cut long story short, went to Wakefield Prison, went through all the security, went through all the dogs sniffing you and all the scanning machines and all the rest of it, got in to see Charlie.  So we've got in, we sat there and he's just looked at me like, all right, and he's gone. Me and you can do some work together. And I said, what do you mean? And he went, I want to work with you. I want me and you to work together. So I said, what do you mean? What do you want me to do?  I've seen you on the telly. You get on great with all the newspapers. You get stuff done. You get loads of stuff in the media. And, and that's it. I want you to work with me.  You know, I want to make money, I want to make a few quid.  He's not allowed to profit. So I'll go into that a little bit later on. So anyway, so we're having this, we're having this meeting for a couple of hours at the right laugh, eating ice cream, drinking coffee, having a laugh, all the rest of it. And, and he said he wanted me to be his PR agent. So I said, right, okay. So what's in it for me?  And he just said, I want you to get me loads of publicity.  So I said, yeah, all right, I'm interested. So went off, had a little think about it. We're in the car in the way and Paul is like, right, well, you can be my manager, but Bambi, get me on loose women and this and the other and whatever. Paul is a lovely one. I'm not going to say it's slagging her off. She's absolutely lovely. She's fantastic. You're really good laugh. But she just craved the publicity. And that's essentially what Paul wanted. And, you know, I'm not saying she didn't love Charlie or he didn't love her or whatever, but you know, everybody says that Paul got together with Charlie for the publicity side of it. I mean, that's down to her. I was just working as a PR agent and that's what I do as a media specialist. So I went home, had a little think about it. Went to visit Charlie again. Went to visit him when I said, right, if we're going to do it, we're going to do it 50 50 straight down the middle. I take my 50% of everything we make. The other 50% goes into a pot. We set a company up with a friend of yours or whatever we're going to do. I'm not paying any money to you. I will pay it to whoever you nominate, whichever company or whatever to receive the money because I'm not allowed to pay you anything. So I'm not going to go into that. So I spoke to Charlie further and we basically decided between us, we were going to literally just take the piss out of the prison service and out of the world's media.  So basically I went to see him again. We had another visit. We ironed out what we were going to do. He said he wanted this publicity, wanted that publicity, wanted the rest of it. He wanted this exposing, wanted that exposing, all the rest of it. So we went on the second visit. And after the second visit, I got banned. I got banned from going to the prison and I was like, why am I banned?   We don't allow journalists into the maximum security facility. We don't allow journalists to speak to cat-a prisoners. You're not allowed to see him anymore and that's it. So I spoke to Charlie. He used to bring me up every night and I said to him, I said I'm banned. I can't see him anymore. Can't come and visit you. That's it. Can't do anything.   So I said, right, okay then. So Charlie's a very, very clever guy, very clever guy. And as far as the media goes, I'm a very clever guy as well.  I've got a film on Amazon Prime called Stepdad that was made about my life that I wrote and produced. It's been the cinemas and the telly and everything. It's on Amazon Prime. I've got two books out. I've got 12 businesses. I own three museums. I own art galleries. I've got loads of escape rooms. I've got 40 odd full-time staff that work for me. I didn't need anything from Charles Bronson financially at all. So I said to him, well, for me to get in and to help you learn about all the treatment that's been going on and working towards helping you change and get your parole sorted out and all the rest of it, I need to be involved. And I've come up with a plan. And he said, what's the plan? And I said, well, I was born in 1971, never had any parents, brought up in a children's home, never met me dad. You went into prison in 1974. So how do you feel about having a little son that you didn't know about before you went into prison?  So I said, right, we need to lay some ground rules down, right? If we're going to do this, we need to do it. And there's only me and you need to know about it, nobody else. So I think you know what you're going to see here. Right. Are you Charlie Bronson's son? No, I'm not Charles Bronson's son.  I'm a paparazzi photographer. I'm a journalist. And I do a lot of undercover work, PR work with the media, right? So you've got all these brain boxes online that have just literally for years. I've been going, he's a fraud. He's a con man. He's conning Charlie.  He's going on about this DNA test and all those of it. Everything that came up about me being Charlie's son was what me and Charlie did together as a team, both of us, as a team, as a laugh, to make money, to have a laugh, to keep him like buzzing with stuff to do, and to also help me get in a situation where I could carry on seeing him at the prison and I could get involved in his legal battle. Because it wasn't doing very well at the time. He was still beating prison guards and everything up at the time. So, you know, his behaviour was going down early. He had charges coming up where he was appeared in court and all the rest of it. So I said to him, listen. I said, let's do it then. So he said to me, right, prove to me how good you are. So I said, right, what do you mean? And he said, get me on the front page of the Sunday papers.  So I said, right, okay, I'll prove myself. So I said to him, do you want a baby?   I said, well, you don't want a baby. I said, but just tell me you want a baby.   And I'll get you on the front page of the Sunday papers. And he went, right, right, let's do it then. Let's do it. So he wrote a letter to me saying, right, I want a baby with Paula. Dead or Dead or Dead and all this sort of stuff. So, sold the story to the papers. Got it on the front page of the Sunday papers. Headline, Bronson, I want a baby. Monday morning, no, Sunday night, phone me up.   I can't believe it. All the screws are talking about it. All the prison lads are talking about it and all the rest of it. So we started having a laugh, right? And we started doing it in a few quid. And every single penny that we earn, I took 50% of everything that we did. The other 50% went to one of his friends to do with whatever they wanted to do with. That's all I want to say about that. So every single deal that we ever did with the newspapers, TV, anything like that, it wasn't just me going out like doing stories and planting these things and getting all this publicity. It was me saying to Charlie, right, watch and think about this idea. Watch and think about that idea. Yeah, do it. Brilliant. Watch and think about this idea.  Right, we'll leave that one. What about this one? Yeah, it's brilliant. Let's do it.  And they went, what do you mean? I said, Charles Bronson is my dad. And they went, is he?  I said, that's it, I've been in the children's zone since 1971. And then what I'd done was, I spoke to Charlie and we'd been sending each other all these coded letters and everything. So I started getting Charlie to write to me and tell me things about my mom and about my childhood that I already knew that he never knew.  And all these details about my mom, all these letters that were being sent to me were all being read by the prison service. So in the end, the prison service contacted me and said, right, we want to arrange for you to come back and start visiting Charlie. So I said, well, why is the change of heart? And they went, well, we know he's your dad and we can't break any family ties and we want to keep that family tie together so you can come back and start visiting him.  And then it says friend. And then on this occasion I went to visit him, George Bambi and it said, Sond, underneath. So I've got in. So I've walked into the maximum security unit. I think at this time he was at Franklin Prison. And I've walked in and he's gone, all right, stand! And I've gone, all right, dad! And he's gone, do you know what?  We've even got the same nose. We've even got the same jawline and he starts going on about all this and me and Emma are just like laughing to each other and pissing about and all the rest of it. And that was it. That was the agreement that me and Charlie had. You know, I worked as a PR agent for him.  We pulled the wall over the eyes of the prison service. And everybody knows Charlie loves being in the papers. I mean he used to ring me up with some ludicrous stuff sometimes. I mean he'd ring me up saying, right, George, I've had me done it today. I should have had five spots and he's only four. Right, get it exposed, get it in the Sunday star this week. And I'm like, Charlie, doesn't work like that.  Let's think of something else. So then we sit there and then he'd ring me and he'd go, right, I've got this idea. Or I'd say, right, I've got that idea. So we just keep coming up with these ideas.  So I said to Monday, I said, right, should we go for another front page Sunday paper? I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What have you got? What have you got? So I said, well, have you ever done a will? And he went, no.   So he sent me a letter over through his solicitor, all signed and everything, dead official. When I die, I want my brain handed over to George Bambi in my son, put in a jar, pickled and put in his museum. So sent the letter over front page of Sunday papers. He absolutely loved it. He used to ring me and we'd just been laughing our heads off. I mean, we were just literally running rings around the papers.  But to me, it was good because obviously, I mean, you know, I was making money out of it. I can't say Charlie was making money out of it, but I was making 50% of everything that we made. We'll just leave it at that. Charlie was really, really happy. He was enjoying himself. For the last six years, I've been paying his canteen.  Some prisoners only get like a five or if you've not got any family or whatever. Charlie always had his full-time and every week for the last five or six years, I've always paid him every single week so he can eat what he does, whatever. Nice little nest egg that he's got. Well, indirectly, whatever, through one of his friends. That's between Charlie and whoever. I don't get involved in that. Any deals that we do have always been completely open, been completely honest. We've had a brilliant relationship over the years. We've had a cracking relationship. And then it starts saying, right, why don't you get me on the telly? Why don't you get me on this program? Why don't you get me on that program? So I'm organising all these programs, getting him on, getting his face on the telly. And then it started seeing each other.  So I'm managing Paula and I'm managing the UK's most notorious violent prisoner in the prison system.  I'm enjoying it and I'm enjoying the process. But the thing was, I struck up a really, really close friendship with Charlie and we got on really, really well. We had a mega laugh. I go and see him every two weeks. Most of the time, I might miss a month there or there, but generally I'd seen 10, 12 times a year.   Obviously Charlie's not doing Charlie any good being in the papers and doing this and doing that and whatever. And I'm saying to Charlie, all these people are saying, this is all bollocks with the paper, you shouldn't be doing it.  This is being used. It's nothing to do with anything else. Tell them to keep their mind out of their own business. This is our business. Nothing to do with anything else and that's it. So I just carried on working with Charlie and over a period of time, we had a really, really good relationship and I got really close to him. And I got that close to him. It was actually like having a father and son relationship.   I tell him how proud I was of him, behaving himself.  Shouldn't be in here. And I've seen it to myself, why is he still in? And then I've seen loads of loads of stuff with Paula and then he turned around one day and said he's getting married to Paula. He said to me, right, I wanted to arrange a wedding.  So I'm arranging this wedding. He's ringing me every half an hour. Right, get a dwarf. Right, get this, get someone a juggling. I want some llamas. I want this and it was ridiculous. Organise this wedding anyway. Sort with all the wedding now. And wedding went ahead. Paula, obviously, you know, she was getting married at Wakefield. We did a deal with the papers. All the money and everything went to Paula. I took my 50%. Paula got her 50%. So everything had to be Paula. She got 50% of everything. So then I was taking on Loose Women. I was taking on Lorraine this morning. All the different programmes.  I mean, we were literally just walking around and getting three grand off that show. Walking in the next studio on Lorraine, getting another three grand. Walking in the next studio, getting another two grand off that. It was ridiculous. It was a farce. But Paula was making a good few quid. I was making a good few quid. And it was good fun. It was good fun. Now, people watching this will be saying, you know, is it good fun? You're talking about someone's life here and all the rest of it. What they need to remember is everything I've ever done with Charlie has always been with his complete and full knowledge and his approval before I've done anything that we've ever done. So. I think that's the main thing, though.  You've done all the paparazzi stuff. Yeah, but everyone knew that straight away. I had you Charlie Bronson Sander's question marks, but then you had Charlie Fohen and I thought, possible. Right. You know when we're on the show? Last time I was on the show. Charlie Bronson happened to ring up in the middle of the podcast and I was like, oh, hello, Charlie. I'm on The James English Show. I spoke to him a couple of nights before and said I'm going on The James English Podcast in a couple of hours.     So he goes, right, right. Get me on it. Get me on the show. So I said, right. I said, well, I'm doing the podcast tomorrow one o'clock or whatever. Ring me half one on the dot. I'll put me, leave me phone on. When you ring me, just be aware that you are going to be on The James English Podcast. So watch what you say. Be careful what you say. Blah, blah, blah. So anyway, we're having a little chat. After 12, the phone goes, hiya, Dads. Hiya, son. How are you? All right. And then we start having a chat.  Well, it's Charlie Foley. I can't believe that was really good timing. Phone down. I'm a journalist.  I set things up with the media. Soon as I came on the show and like, soon as we started the ball rolling, the one thing that really, really upsets me about this whole thing. Soon as the father and son thing started rolling, it just gathered pace. It gathered more pace and more pace and more pace.  He's, Charlie doesn't know what the fuck's going on in prison. He's taking the piss out of him. He's living off his name. He's living a lavish lifestyle on the back of Charlie.   I've got loads of businesses.  I'm retired. All these people saying that I've made money off Charlie. Me and Charlie had a business arrangement and it was a really good business arrangement and we did really, really well. So it is what it is. But came to the stage where with me working under cover as you would say, me and Charlie made a pact that if we did this, we would never tell anybody that I wasn't a biological son. Right. So I said, right, okay. If that's how we're going to do it, that's how we're going to do it. I won't even tell members of my family. So I didn't even tell my wife. Didn't even tell my son. I didn't tell anybody. Charlie didn't tell any of his family. Didn't tell his mom, didn't tell his brother. And I'm like, well, what's going to happen?   It's business. It's nothing to do with them.   And I was like, right, okay.  I mean, I was brought up in a kid's home. Never had any family.   So never had a dad. It all worked out like it was engineered and it was perfectly put together. But then I saw a podcast the other day and I was reading something which made me think to myself, right before that we did this doc just so people know. We've been working on this documentary for about three years and when we used to speak on the phone, we used to call the people because I was working for Channel 4 and my remit was to get video footage and photographs of Charles Bronson for the TV. Something that nobody had ever been successful at doing in the past because the prison service, Dennis Nielsen, all these other people, they allowed the cameras to go in and interview them.  They never ever wanted Charlie's father's sake to be able to say anything. So if you're walking to a prison with a camera and you film something or you've got covert cameras on you, you're looking at two years inside. So that wasn't an option. I remember the second... I think it was the second time I went to see... I don't know the first time I went to see him. He went, he looked at me and he goes, right! I've seen these things on the telly and I went, what? And he went, I've got an idea.  And he goes, every morning, 10 o'clock in the morning, I go out on the exercise yards, tomorrow, get one of them satellites from space, get the picture to zoom down and I'll lie on me back on the floor doing press-ups and you can get some pictures and videos of me.  What do you mean? I've seen him on the telly and I said, no, it doesn't work like that, Charlie. It don't work. Anyway, so I'm going to have a laugh about it. So Charlie goes, right. You're my son now. This is obviously moving later on. We can have pictures taken together. So we had some pictures taken together. Charlie said, right, get me the papers. Get me the papers. Sell them. Get me the papers. So we did that. All the thing with the son was gathering momentum and all the rest of it. And then he never liked technology. He never has technology. So in his cell he's got a dab radio. He's got a telly. That's it. He's allowed a PlayStation. He won't have one. DVD player. He won't have one. I said, why don't you get a DVD player and you can watch the film, Bronson.  If you...  I'm not having... I'm not having it. I'm not doing it and that's it. And when Charlie says something, he means it. And he's very unreasonable sometimes with his stubbornness because unless you explain to him what you're actually talking about or what you're trying to get at, so he acknowledges what you're actually talking about, he'll just turn it down and that will be it. There'll be no talking about it again.   Loads of times. I did a newspaper article once. He said, right.   Well, all these artworks nice, obviously. I'm not... Don't really like that.  And where do you want to live when you come out of prison? He said, what I live in a caravan. I said, we'll do a nice, nice picture of a caravan. Do a really nice picture of a caravan and do some flowers.    So he did this picture, the caravan and it was absolutely sensational. Absolutely unbelievable. It had flowers on it.  It had the sea in the background. This caravan. And it was amazing. And then you look closer and the caravan's got bars on the windows and it's got cameras on the top of the caravan. It's got barbed wire on the top and all. I'm like, why have you got all that?    That's how he's been programmed. So anyway, going back to this program with Channel 4 he said to me ages ago, I want my own program on the telly. He said, there's loads of programs you've done for me in the past where I've been mentioned and I've been on them and you know, I've been blah, blah, blah. I want my own program and I want to be able to tell my own story and I want to be able people to see me on the telly talking and telling my story. So I said, right, okay. I said, well, I'm going to have to work out a way that we can do it because I can't come in with covert cameras and start filming you know because it's illegal and I'll end up getting locked up.   That's it. Right, how are we going to do it? So anyway, obviously I've been working for Channel 4 for years and I actually put this idea to Channel 4 or 5 4 or 5 years ago to say I'm doing this under cover program with Charles Bronson.  Next thing, I'll get a text message of Richard Booth, a'r aeth o Charlie's.    That's exactly what he said to me. gyda'r ffond. That's one thing.   I ain't doing it. I said I'll write a really nice letter to the court as your friend and blah blah blah and telling them how wonderful you are on all the rest of it.    Charles Brons has been on the telly given his own voice and all this has come out and all the publicity you've got. Dave Courtney, right? He did a thing, he did a little video. Did a video on his Facebook or whatever. And obviously Charlie had wrote him or spoke to him on the phone.  I think he said a few spiteful things on there. He said a few things that he shouldn't have said and blah blah blah. I think it was all geared around Bambi himself and blah blah blah and this sat on the other. And he said all these things on this Facebook thing. So I watched it and I thought to myself, do you know what?  I completely accept everything that Dave Courtney said on that video. Completely and utterly. Because what he was saying was from Charlie's point of view and his own point of view. I don't accept that. And do you know what? I've got a lot of respect for that man. I didn't know him before and I've got a lot of respect for him. After seeing that. So the next day Charlie's got a friend of his Richard Booth. I've had some really good dealings with Richard Booth. He's an absolutely lovely guy. And he's got Charlie's interest, best interest at heart. And I completely appreciate that. Charlie rings him up.     So he can't ring me now.   You're not doing it anymore.   They've completely cut me off. I'm no good to Charlie now because he can't ring me.  I can't visit him. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway.   Blah, blah, blah. Richard's got caught in the middle. You know, I messaged Richard back.   Which maybe I shouldn't. Because he's a lovely, lovely guy. He's genuinely got Charlie's interest at heart. And I completely appreciate that. So he went to the papers.     Anyway, the next day Dave Courtney rang me. And I've had a few conversations with Dave Courtney. Don't know him that well.    And I'm not just saying that. He really is. He rang me up. Hi George. Cos I rang him. I said look Dave, I want to go to the Royal Courts of Justice.    I said, will you come down to the court with me? And you know, just come in with me. And Dave said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, have you got me on the approval list or whatever? I'll come in with you. I said, right. So I said, I don't know whether he spoke to Charlie by this time or not. So I sent Dave the form over. He's filled it in. I spoke to the parole one and said, look, I want to bring someone with me, blah, blah, blah. Going to the hearing and all this. So that was it. So they said, yeah, we've already organised you two spaces cos he went months ago. We've already saved two for you. I said, right. So anyway, Dave rang me the next day. And he said, Dave, he said, he said, George, he said, listen, it's Dave. I'm just giving you a ring. I've had Charlie on the phone.   So I said to Dave, I said, right. I said, okay, listen. I said, that's fair enough. I said, fine. I appreciate you ringing me up. Blah, blah, blah. And yeah, I said, I appreciate you ringing me. You know, fair play, blah, blah, blah. And then we got talking. And I just turned around to Dave. I said, listen, Dave. I said, let me tell you something.  I said, I heard what you said on that thing that you did yesterday. And I said, fair play to you. You didn't say anything that wasn't justified. Right.  And he went, I said, yeah. I said, well, I haven't told anybody. I said, believe it or not, you're actually the first person that I've told. In fact, no, he's the second person I've told. I said, I'm not Charlie's son.    That's nothing to do with me, blah, blah, blah. I said, but he's not my dad.   And you know what he's sewn round to me and said? He said, you know what, George? He said, I really appreciate you telling me that. And he actually said to me, it won't go any further. And fair play, he's not said a single word to anybody. But he was really, really understanding on the phone. And I thought, he didn't need to be like that.  You could have said whatever you wanted. But he didn't.  He was looking after Charlie's interests. And he was really nice and respectful to me. So it was all cool.  And I'm sat at home. I think this was on the Saturday. And their name and owns rang me. And a few other people were like, George, can you come in?   Blah, blah, blah. So I thought to myself, do you know what?     It's parole is on Monday. This was on the Saturday and I was fuming.         That's what I wanted to say. But then I thought to myself, no, you can't do that.   Is that a massive impact on my life?   I've worked with him. He said to me on the phone so many times, nobody has done in six years. What you've done for me in six years, nobody on this planet has ever done for me in my whole life. And he always says that.   And hopefully I have been of a lot of benefit to his life and I'll take all the positives that I've learned out of his life. So anyway, I've sat there.  I've sat there, GMB news.  And I'm due to go on. So I thought right. So I've got on.  And it's like, right, we're going live.   I'm like, yes. You know, Charlie's been really good. He's never hurt anybody. He's never hurt one more time. He should be let out. He's fucking, what they've done to be the present service is absolutely terrible. It's awful. You know, saying all these really lovely things about him. Fucking amazing things about him. So I've come off that.  I've done these other shows. I've done these other ones.  Radio, TV, everywhere. I got picked up at half six in the morning to do amen.   I turned my phone on.   And I sat there. I can't remember what I was doing.  It was some breakfast news. I can't remember what I did that many. So I sat there and I thought, is parole hearing starts at 10 o'clock?  And he went, why, why, why, what's up? And I went, I'm going to Charlie's Parole. And he went, what? And I went, I'm going to Charlie's Parole. I'm really sorry. I'll come back and do it for you at lunchtime or whatever. And he went, he got me a car.     Yeah. Get this brand new legal team for him that we've been working tirelessly for three years and get him an open parole hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice and for me not to turn up. So I thought, do you know what?          How do you know Charlie?  I've applied for a seat to come and see him.  Do you know what I mean?  So I thought, I ain't, I mean anybody telling me I'm not coming here.      I was the one that got this public parole for him. So then the parole started and started talking and then they said something about the parole board. I said, oh yeah, just so everyone knows there was a TV documentary which was made last Monday and Tuesday, Prime Time Channel 4, 9pm. Just to let everybody know, none of the parole board have seen that documentary whatsoever. We have not seen it and the law were not allowed to look at it and we will not be judging anything to do with this hearing on that programme. So Charlie turned round.  And then I sat there thinking, oh fucking, I'll calm down Charlie.  And then Dean wanted to get up for a piss.  And I thought, do you know what? I can't sit here and watch her.  Take it nice and easy and take some deep breaths.    But the thing was, so in the end I thought, do you know what?   Martin Brunt saw me from the sky news and gave me a wave.    So I've gone and I've got home to the hotel and I've started doing all these other interviews, really positive interviews and all the rest of it.   Who doesn't like a bet? Who doesn't like this?  But anyway, to finish off, one of the reasons I wanted to come on here, and I really appreciate you giving me a platform to come and say this. The father and son thing, this started off as a job.  We've had a real laugh. But I saw a newspaper article the other day and it was Charlie's brother Mark. And basically it said on there that Mark wouldn't back Charlie's release while Charlie was still going on with the fake son story. Now, in the past Mark's family, Charlie's family they've often been 5,000 quid to take a DNA test and I've always just said just not had any communication with them, not spoke to them, not had anything to do with them.  So I'm like right. Then I saw that thing and I thought, you know what?      But then I started thinking to myself, there needs to be an end. There's always this stuff, when you're doing a cover job there's got to be a start, there's got to be a middle, there's got to be an end. There was never an end to this. Just kept going on and on and on.  This is not what I do, I'm a PR agent. So, I said to myself the other day, this has got to come to an end.  When's your dad getting out?       If he wants to contact me in a few months or write me a letter or whatever, reply, I might not.   So I mean releasing it after would be really good. How do you think Charlie will be if you're coming out now?   I've spent more time with him and anybody else, do I think he'll be dangerous?  How do you think the reaction will be?


Well, at the end of the high school sports season, we compile the top five plays of spring. Let's start with number five, Pillage or Softball, Vanessa Peterson with the RBI here. They beat Sabika twice in sections to advance to the state tournament. Let's go number four, Lumberjack, baseball, Brennan Cougenmeister. He's going to walk it off against Moorhead. Game-winning hit here. Another great season for Bemidji, section runner up to Alexandria. Number three, Pequot, Lakes Girls Golf. Alex Stone just torching this car three. Check out this shot just within feet of the cup. Do a tie for third in the class two-way state championships. Play number two, Pierce Baseball. State semis against Duluth Marshall. Matthew Todd just game-winning hit. Also threw a shot out in this one. The pioneers would finish second in class two-way, the mini-ha-ha. And play number one, Bemidji Boys Track. Isaac Berg, Alex Bowen, Cody Roder and Linus Whiting, the four by 800 meter team. They win a state title and go on to win a heat later on in the national tournament. So congrats to all of the spring athletes. A lot of plays I could have put on here. A lot of great moments here in this class. Well, it was a pretty momentous spring for a lot of the high schools in our viewing area. Yeah, absolutely. A couple of teams making it to state for the first time. It was a great season to start off with. Absolutely. That's a hard list to go through, so good job. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


introductions and yeah welcome everybody again to the webinar. Very excited that you're here. This is a topic that Rohan and I are both very passionate about so hopefully the next 40 minutes or so there's a lot to learn and yeah keep the questions coming. We'll wait till the end to go sequentially through the questions and so if you have any sort of questions or comments please please add them. So who are these two people talking at with you today? So first I'm Robbie Lochman. I'm an evangelist at Harness. In my background I've worked at a few firms. I've worked at IBM, Red Hat, Investors Fair and so distributed systems is my game. I had way too many outages, blew the error budget. Now I was told I can't touch production anymore and this is where I met my friend Rohan. Rohan, let me tell the folks a little bit about yourself. Hey guys, Rohan Gupta here. I was a software engineer at G. I worked on the CICD tool internally and then you know my journey kind of took me to Harness. We love CICD here obviously and you know I was a solution architect so I really helped you know users adopt the products and really learned about CICD and governance along the way and I kind of fell in love with this topic as we were you know exploring the space and now I'm a product manager and get to enable all of us to you know build cool things with our product and be able to deploy seamlessly. Now awesome Rohan and so what I'm going to be talking about today. So we have four main topics we're going to kind of cover. Just as a level set what is continuous delivery so we're just not talking in the ether a little bit about introduction to what even is a policy and then the genesis of OPA and what is OPA and then for the fun stuff open policy agent and continuous delivery better together. So we'll walk you through a few use cases that we've seen and also some of the art of the possible and then also we also participate in another Linux Foundation sub foundation which is part of the CNCF the continuous delivery foundation. A lot of acronyms there but also a lot of the work that we're doing in the CDF is helping everybody leverage continuous delivery and so also how you can get started and join the CDF. So continuous delivery what is continuous delivery so continuous delivery here's one of the the always a big fan of books and there'll be a couple books throughout the presentation but here's one of the most quintessential pieces about continuous delivery that is named continuous delivery by Jess Humble and David Farley and so basically continuous delivery is all about getting to production safely. The keyword there is safely in my career I've gotten to production a lot sometimes it hasn't been very safe or people will question that wasn't very repeatable or that's a very bespoke process but continuous delivery is about making sure that the path to production where your customers are so your internal or external customers is a safe and repeatable path and that's it right so it's easier said than done but we can get into how this is actually a little bit tricky that because like all of us there's no one path to software and so let me show you what I call the lifeblood of an application. I like I like doughnuts so in this case the doughnut is an application but similar to medieval times the humors or humors there's typically four humors to power an application so clearly an application needs some these resources an application will need compute resources it needs to run somewhere so at some point you don't need some sort of durable storage either how is the application binaries or data so you need storage networking it's like if a tree fell in the woods can you hear it an application that doesn't have any sort of connectivity this is an application and then also your application needs application infrastructure so take a look at these things yeah landscape there's you know thousands of cards out there that these particular projects are coming up that will help power the next generation of cloud data of applications or if you're not using cloud data that some sort of application infrastructure that will help you power this delicious doughnut and so let's talk about what it actually looks like when we call a CICD pipeline or a continuous delivery pipeline so I call this all in the pipeline right and so basically there's multiple steps just dropping a binary into production now some of the newer mindsets out there is you know what maybe when we have one particular manifest or one particular resource you have to drop but that's it there's a lot of rigor that goes into making sure our changes are sane and making sure that our changes are safe and usually there's this two right end of the radio dial on the left with these earlier stages you need to enable innovation right so there'll be a lot of iteration going on if you watch how I write software it's actually kind of dirty I try and try and try and try and try to like it you know get it right and that's probably you know a number of times but too many to get something right but also you don't want to be keep trying as you get to production your confidence needs to increase in each sequential step that hey we're building more confidence so by the time you get to production there's not a particular your change failure rate is low so going back from left to right hey you know what in dev orchestrating such things as a code analysis maybe what I've written I want to make sure that those functions are right some new unit tests and then maybe I'll pretend throughout the example that Rohan and I are in the same team which we are what I wrote works with what Rohan wrote so if I first said usually it's the trouble maker in two now kind of getting into now we're infrastructure where in that middle stage right so we've deployed it somewhere we want to make sure that we didn't do any detriment to the infrastructure we're running smoke and soap tests and performance tests and then as you get to production we're actually leveraging safe approaches such as a canary release and I'll explain what a canary release is really quickly but really core to this delivery is making sure that safety is there right so is that one and done a lot of times we're not deploying something for the first time the reason why this is so important is if I was like version one and we're rolling out version one like who cares but if it's like anything else you have to make a change making sure that your users aren't impacted that becomes a big business so really quickly about a canary deployment so basically going through the journey of what a canary is if you're unfamiliar with a canary deployment it's an incremental release and so here the user is represented by a taco love food and basically so let's say you are the user and this delicious taco through the magic of load balancing we're running incremental releases so in the application versions here they can let's say chunky otter is version 1.0 and the canary version 1.1 with the first incremental release it basically you're making sure that the canary survives right so like in this particular version we have we deployed 33% of the canary and then still stable as two chunky otters in the sequential pass when we determine everything is correct we promote the canary to 100% of the traffic and chunky otters no more but this is an oversimplified example lots of times canary itself multiple phases and there's very bespoke rules and how to deploy lastly before we get into what a policy is I like to always bring up the confidence trifecta right and this is a rationale for why do you have a policy why do you even enforce anything and so in the DevOps marker you always hear people process technology right so these three more chance but let's talk about let's break this down where are actually you the least confident well let's start with technology it's actually fairly you know I would say it's fairly objective not subjective to be confident in technology for example I have a Kubernetes cluster and there's a reason I have five worker nodes on that Kubernetes cluster because I can take two concurrent failures of a particular application right so I'm fairly confident in my distributed system design that I have a robust and resilient piece of infrastructure that is that is objective where it gets a little bit more subjective an extremely subjective is it's more the process could be subjective right so certain industries have more stringent change management processes because you know why the people we're as people were emotional and we're extremely subjective right so where do you have the most confidence and we're going to by using something like OPA we're able to blend all three so you're able to have a process that is confident you're technically confident in the process and also because of the people who are authoring it you self enforce the policy which we'll talk about a little bit but that brings us to the next word a policy so what is exactly a policy I have a Geico insurance policy on my car but these policies are just a little bit different so a textbook definition of a policy it's a deliberate systems and principles and goals to enforce a rational outcome right so a policy might be you know you have to be 21 to drink because you know you might make bad decisions if you're not 21 or in computer systems you know what your password must be 25 characters my funny story my sister started a new job and her password had to be 25 characters and I was cracking up I'm like I can't even think of a 25 character password but that is a IT security policy that she has to abide by so it really defined the goals and elements of your organization's computer systems or just principles in general is a policy so that is what a policy is let's talk about another conundrum with that a lot of us are going through right if you haven't gone through it yet you'll go through it soon enough so here I have my friend Rohan again as we ever said about Rick but Rohan is a new site reliability engineer on the team or he's a new SRE in our product team now let's take a look at our product stack this is a pretty forward-thinking product stack so we are leveraging Kubernetes for the app stack so we're leveraging Kafka we're leveraging several spring projects and we're using CockroachDB as our persistent stack and then kind of looking at the non-application stack so for our observability and monitoring and visualization we're using Prometheus we're using FluentD as aggregator and then we're displaying everything in Grafana cool right like this is a modern application stack I would say this is a very forward-thinking stack and leveraging several projects from the Linux foundation in our stack but we have a little bit of a conundrum here this is what I like to call see this is what I like to call the conundrum so let's say that we have a problem right and so Rohan actually needs more access than what he actually has and so Rohan being a new site reliability engineer like let's say you're gone forbid we have some sort of issue or outage an incident he's a more correct term and Rohan's using the team Rohan needs more access so in the grand scheme of things there's two-part combination there's authorization on an unauthentication authorization would be does this person Rohan right and so yes you know we have credentialing like Rohan has a harness email address and you know we have octa and all that good stuff so it's like yes he is who he says he is simple that's solved but what is not solved in this distributed system problem is can Rohan have elevated access that he needs to get data or to get information for us to have a recalls analysis on the systems and answers no and if we have to go and make a change for Rohan to get more data or to get higher let's say um author or higher authorization uh it's basically a redeploying to Kafka I'm redeploying to the spring stack I'm redeploying to cockroach I've redeployed to all of our monitoring observability stack and so as you can see a simple request for you know we know who Rohan is but he needs elevator privileges is a problem and there's a lot of deployments that we have to do and so this is the exact problem that OPA steps into right so enter OPA so regardless if it's harkoff with you regardless if it's you know our Prometheus stack regardless if it's the application stack or even you know the database stack uh Rohan's still here right so he's still you know he's he didn't go anywhere he's there Rohan but um but that's basically it OPA acts as a policy agent and so it focuses on the authorization piece right like what are you authorized to see it could be entitlements it could be the privileged data but basically OP OPA sits between or actually it sits above depending how you want to look at it uh these particular services because in a modern microservice architecture uh you know as brilliant as microservices are you're having more endpoints so you're having more deployments but kind of that connective tissue is actually communication right so the four main benefits a whole big benefits that OPA has is that it simplifies authorization across remark services so no matter what service you have we get a double the number of services that we had or triple it's a piece of cake for OPA because it's the central cop between those authorization calls it uses common remote protocols so HDP HPS also if using SSH or gRPC the OPA understands the particular protocols because OPA basically will make a decision on that and clearly between all of those services there's some sort of payload right like you know it's not uh you know mystery binary getting shared across or cobra actually that got removed from the java spec recently but it's not a mystery right like it's it's a payload you can make a decision on and OPA has this particular uh particular language called rego it's a declarative pausing language so you say hey based on these conditions on this payload what is the action you want to do the last big benefit before I hand it over to my brother Rohan is that this is chicken and the egg question right like it actually solves a very intrinsic question and usually the answer would be no to this uh take OPA out of the picture how often as an engineer do you have access to production probably not you know as a software engineer right unless you're like a let's say assistant engineer infrastructure engineer a cloud engineer you rarely have access to problems there's business controls to separate you away from production because technically if you write it you can't enforce it right if I if I wrote something they'll never let me see in a production because you know I know all the ins and outs and can I be trusted to enforce something but OPA actually does this right OPA actually allows the authors of the system to enforce the system and so with that let me turn it over to my friend Rohan to talk about how do you actually how can we start leveraging OPA and enforcing certain rules and uh continuous delivery thanks Ravi so one thing that we've been seeing you know with OPA and in this continuous delivery kind of spaces how do I centralize you know my pipeline deployments in the sense everyone has the ability to kind of configure pipelines and leverage pipelines but how do I know you know who is using what who is doing what role in this process because enforcing a standard pipeline across some entire organizations or teams it's hard but like you know I might have access to a dev environment my manager might have access to the prod environment we might not just because we know each other really well or you know we have a good working relationship maybe we you know hand off you know we we ease up on the restrictions a little bit how do we make sure that you know the business policies that you know our sec ops teams or operation teams are providing they are enforced they they they have some sort of structure in place where we have that kind of separation of duties we have that idea of a standard pipeline kind of design we have the ability to balance between this rigid structure and I still care about my developers freedom I want them to be able to you know build pipelines design pipelines and also deploy frequently because we also have the job of you know delivering features at a high velocity for our business so these are kind of the problems that we we we see in continuous delivery but we also see opa as a really is a supplement to this process where we can start putting some structure in place and enforce it in the lower levels and it's stronger together and we've seen that because you see as opa it's it's nice as a as a drag go essentially so you have the ability to kind of define this as code you don't have to be the best programmer to figure this out it's pretty pretty high level as you don't need to know Java or Python it's it's very much just looking through the json and kind of picking out which fields you want to enforce because the whole communication in opa is by json so it actually is really helpful for you know sec ops and compliance uh base people because they they might not need to know how to write you know Java code or Python code to build a system to kind of enforce their business policies on like a pipeline it it's very it's user friendly it reads nicely and you can kind of figure out based off reading it how what the rule is what's it going to enforce so you as a compliance or sec ops persona would definitely be able to write these rules and then you can rely on your you know dev ops team to kind of deploy and enforce these roles and that in itself enables teams to kind of deploy in a consistent manner that's not only compliant with their business but it also enables them to have a repeatable successful kind of process and as you see here it's opa is you know designed for kubernetes it was uh you know it's really good at managing the config management it's it's it keeps you know me from specifying resources that are way too big and i'm not blowing up my cluster every week or i have a bunch of teams deploying into the same namespace and it's starting to make things make a mess in that namespace so i have to clean it up later we can really kind of have structure and enforcement around how we deploy our resources and kubernetes without having such a deep technical understanding of kubernetes and the underlying you know behavior of how pods are getting scheduled and who's taking up what resources we can put guardrails in place so we don't have to deal with those kind of lower level problems and we see a lot of benefits from it we've seen users really love this kind of granular structure because i don't have to configure the r back and all these different systems i have to configure it up the kubernetes level i have to configure it at the git level i have to configure it at you know the the grafana level i have to configure it at the app d level those kind of tools that's that's just part of the equation i could have one system to define it and i can have one system to be the interface for it that's that's the the benefit of you know adopting more of like a policy driven uh enforcement kind of approach with your software systems and so some of the problem spaces we can as you saw in ravi's earlier slide around deploying to your dev environment deploying to your qa environment you saw that there was like smoke tests regression tests um there was like scans those kind of pieces are very very uh crucial in your deployment pipeline so there's two parts to this one is you know opa i feel if you're familiar with it a lot of people talk about the r back capabilities and it's a very very powerful tool for that but i think other pieces of this that opa can be applicable for is like quality decision and evidence the reason why is because when you're doing a deployment you are running your tests you're running some scans or making sure the image doesn't have anything that's vulnerable but as it progresses through the deployment you lose sight of those pieces of information because you just you're just seeing it the results and you're just continuing to let the build go through the process what we want to what we see is people want evidence that before i say hey this app is going to production i want to see that you've actually hit 90 you know percent on your unit test i want to make sure that sonar cube gives you a great grade i want to see that you know your nexus iq you did a nexus iq scan i i also want to see that you know when you deployed that canary it ran for like 50 minutes and i got metrics from it from app dynamics i want to see all that evidence before i can concretely say go to go to production with my deployment so we've seen it opa as like that rule engine where i can collect all that data and format it in a json format and send it over to my rule engine to dictate did you meet the score is this good enough and that takes the human element out of it so i don't have to chase down these things i have a system pulling it in and then i have a governing system which essentially iterates over it and says hey you failed or you passed there's no gray area you can't say you can't say uh i think this is okay 89 versus 90 that's okay no we we it's at zero one or either in or out that's just people right rohan that's the second part of it that's the difference yeah yeah so we yeah exactly and so we're passing judgment based on evidence and opa really really enables that with the users now the second piece i mentioned earlier you know separation of duties right i i might be you know a developer and ravi will be my manager this case right so i wrote some code and i build it and it triggers off my in my pipeline so it starts building we'll put it through the dev cycle the qa cycle and then hopefully promote it to prod but during that process you know i might need ravi's approval to get to production and so a lot of you know regulated businesses don't want the developer to be the one to approve to production because sometimes what we've been seeing is you know we're we're a team we're we're friends outside of this and so sometimes that kind of spills into you know our process where we say ravi might say hey rohan uh i don't have time to approve this to prod can you just hit approve and let this go through i'll be back later and you know i'm i trust you because you know we've been working together for five years and and things are i trust your judgment however that doesn't fly when i'm building apps that are like touching you know healthcare data or my financial information or you know my insurance information i don't want to i don't want people i want to make sure that the software that you know that i'm i'm i'm consuming as a user actually kind of follows some sort of process so i can and that builds trust with with the user and the consumer so the separation of duty piece is extremely important because in an internal business they definitely don't want the developer to be the one to approve their own bill to production it that's just not going to fly and a lot of you know compliance officers look at that kind of information and logs to say and the reports to say hey are you guys following us a good practice to make sure that you know the consumer is protected and so we see the separation of duties problem come up numerous times and so we think that you know OPA is an excellent you know solution to this problem because you know i can have a list of approvers stored in a kind of a third party system and when i get to the point of deployment you can automate the decision-making so ravi can't let me you know approve to prod and go to lunch you know he he's got to say hey i actually have i'm the only one who can approve Rohan's bill to prod i this bill is going to hold until i do it or i have to reject everyone else who's trying to bypass this rule so OPA is that kind of buffer to say hey you can't do this only x amount of people can do this so this might be ravi this could be my security team this could be my my like head of release someone else besides myself has to perform this task sorry i'm laughing because i've done this uh numerous times in my development days i i've i've over provisioned you know resources and i've crashed clusters i still you know even when i give demos today i create some resources and you know it crashes the demo environment and so deployment configuration sanitary is sanitary this is huge like when i deploy my kubernetes application or my ecs application uh how do i make sure that a the image is not coming from the public docker hub i need to take it from like a private s3 bucket or an artifact like an artifactory or how do i make sure that in the kubernetes like container spec i'm not taking a massive amount of cpu or memory or how do i make sure that the pod has the right labels so i can track it in my other business systems OPA you know really does a good job of being a buffer because essentially before the deployment you can catch that whole thing through gatekeeper and it will check to see hey do you meet these kind of criteria it's like you can write rules like making sure my image is not coming coming from a public repo making sure cpu is under this amount and making sure memory is under this amount and what you can see is those rules are being evaluated and you know that you know there's a guardrail in place that as we're going through the cicd pop process there's a system checking to make sure that my config actually you know it matches my criteria at an infrastructure level and even at the at the config level as well making sure the config is sanitary and my infrastructure is you know safe it's it's de-risked because of this kind of governance we definitely don't want to do you know all our best testing and production i get your aws bill rohan so definitely you're very prone to over provisioning so thanks for my points for my next vacation whenever that would be but yeah was there anything else you want to chat about about use cases before i introduce the ecotinous delivery foundation um i also wanted to talk about uh one last piece which was around the around like enforcement of in the deployment process what about like blackout periods right how do i make sure that people aren't bypassing those how do i and how do i like build a system that you know that can enforce that without me having to say hey guys you are not deploying on friday because i don't want to be on call saturday dealing with this how can i make sure that you know there's a check in place and opi actually can be leveraged for that as well as like a like a as a rule engine to say hey deployments cannot happen on friday deployments cannot happen on monday and so we we have you know a deployment configuration uh is one part of it but actually the process of deploying that at a higher level can be managed by opi as well because at runtime you can definitely send the system like a check saying hey a deployment is starting and then opi can say what's the time take like the metadata of what the time is what the date is and you could very much design like a rule to say hey enforce the blackout window you have to deploy on tuesday wednesday thursday you can't deploy on monday and friday and reject the deployment so you have that peace of mind again i talk i spoke about guardrails it's extremely valuable kind of as an interface for those guardrail policies that we have in place in our organizations today yeah that's perfect and i think we know rohan and myself we talked about there's a lot of rules when going to production right there's not just one you know past this there's there's lots of incremental confidence by going back to the technology choices or process choices even the people choices uh you know how do you enforce that an opa is a perfect rules engine for that you don't have to understand like drools or i log or some other you know fancy rules engine it is it's simple enough that more people a wider swap of skill sets can actually implement it and a lot of what we talked about today it's it's ongoing right like it is how do you bode particular rule sets rule sets that are hard coded or rule sets that have been ingrained deep in a system to something more abstract and that's a lot of the goals that we're seeing with opa open policy agent and continuous delivery but depending on where you are kind of kind of close out with a few points here as you're going along your continuous delivery journey or if you have no idea again what continuous delivery is there is a Linux foundation sub foundation to help you out uh so i want to introduce pay homage to the continuous delivery foundation aka the cdf uh which uh we're a proud part of now so basically the continuous delivery foundation here's actually a presentation in a presentation i actually gave this presentation the screenshot in the middle um called how much should you deploy and i suffer from something called photo photo fair of deploying we're actually this is fun fo d but how much should you be deploying right and a lot of being in industry a lot of what we see uh you know if you're if you read this another book uh lead enterprise uh you might see you know what i need to be deploying a hundred times a day and then you might google it say am i am i crazy how many times a day does a big software from deploy and you don't have to be deploying every 12 seconds right like if you're deploying every six months and you get that down to every three months this is the production right you might be deploying to uh you know a dev interenvironment a hundred times a day but getting into production if you're going to cut that in half you know from six months to three months you're incredibly more agile uh leaving with it's a new a neutral home for many of the continuous delivery tools and projects and so there's several engines out there which harness participates in and so if you're looking to get more into the continuous delivery space the cdf is a great place to be organized there's several special interest groups and working groups they're there so if you want to participate i participate in a few of them extremely open and valuable for you to come and learn more or come and participate in expertise but with that if you would like to get a copy of the presentation or learn a little bit more what you learned about today feel free to hit up this bit.ly or give it a qr scan and so we can actually take a look at what questions have been been asked now so let's take a quick look here in the question and answer section or in the chat so if you have any sort of questions feel free to ask them that looks like our question q is empty uh Rohan and i can answer anything about uh opa or about life in general um if you have advice uh where to eat you know we can give you some some of that too so don't be shy we're here for y'all just give it a few minutes Rohan what is your favorite coffee mine uh i've been actually playing around with the fills uh the testara one or tessara it's been pretty good i like the mid behita one i know i yeah yeah the all right we got some good ones okay how can we attend the slides or the recording um you can hit up this bit we link here i believe the linux foundation will publish not too long after uh recording um what is your favorite distribution of linux Rohan oh man that's a good question that's a good question um i i i'm a big like you know enterprise guy because you know i i started in enterprise it's very much like red hats distribution of linux that's the one that i've kind of learned on and i ride that out but yeah that's that's mine ravi do you have a favorite one i like mint i'm on the mint mojito train i like mint linux it's easy it's been something i'm born to so um i'm a big fan of a big kind of mint actually it's on my mother's laptop i gave to her start learning uh let's see so is there a demo we can do with harness opa um but we actually do have a demo we had a we have a demo but i we actually have a lot of uh blogs that kind of uh in on our harness site that actually go through how to configure it um in harness and how a deployment works uh ravi actually a a colleague tiff um wrote new a couple of them uh and the team can kind of here can kind of check it out and and see kind of how it works with harness and even outside of harness just how how you could design a rule how you can apply it to you know your kubernetes cluster and then you can even test it outside of harness just try running you know gatekeeper and running cube ctl with some sample manifests against it and you'll see kind of how the rule engine behaves yeah perfect um and also yeah we do i think her example is really a really really eloquent one or a simple one it was like uh blocking a namespace that shouldn't have been deployed to so uh makes makes perfect sense um so another question internally do you use opa just for primary deployments or do we use it for other workflows or what have you seen so internally we've been working on some cool things on around you know how we could regulate deployments but also it's it we're looking at it more more it's more than regulating kind of the cluster we're focusing more on the rules engine and kind of how we can you know make a make a judgment call based off off of it so that that's kind of where we've been uh looking more into more than just the restriction of deployments because restriction of deployments um itself opa does does it because it's you know managing the cluster and the configuration before you actually do the apply so uh the the things that we're kind of looking into are more along uh making decisions for you and for for those taking that question one step further i think um always for uh a harness implementation it's not necessarily restricted to kubernetes so you know opa's correct it it grew up on kubernetes but uh you know a lot of times you might be in between like you know you might your organization might not leverage kubernetes or you know which is very valid or you might be having partial apps right like hey like 10 percent 20 percent is on k8s and so just manually going just reiterating for what Rohan said like more it's actually very powerful rules engine so it can be running to orchestrate things and making gay decisions for pipeline decisions that are eventually the end point is a vm or another linux insurance for bare metals so yeah good question is there anything else we can answer feel free well i think we're all set looks like the questions have slowed um so yeah i just thank you everybody for your time uh today there'd be this morning this afternoon this evening uh really really glad to hear these great questions and uh yeah cheers everybody great thank you so much to ravi and rohan for their time today and thank you to all the participants who joined us as a reminder this recording will be on the linux foundation youtube page later today and we hope you're able to join us for future webinars have a wonderful day


Hey, welcome back to the channel. So last week I posted a video on my 2022 Twitter growth plan and that got a really good response rate. People love the breakdown and the clarity there. So I thought why not just create one of these growth plans, this growth plan video for every channel that I'm on this year. So that's what I'm doing. I'm going to start with YouTube here. I'm also going to have one for my email list and my Facebook group. So stay tuned for that over the coming weeks. But before we hop into this growth plan here, make sure if you're enjoying the content, hit the like and subscribe button and watch this video to the end to see my entire growth plan, my goals, topics that I'm going to talk about, my action plan, the things that I messed up in 2021, the mistakes I made, and also how I'm going to solve that this year. And with that said, let's jump into this growth plan for YouTube, my 2022 growth plan right now. So I have this fancy Google Doc on the screen and I'm going to start all these growth plans with my vanity goal. And this is just basically the amount of followers or subscribers that I want to have. So for YouTube, my vanity goal is to cross 50,000 subscribers in 2022. So right now, I'm at about 22,000 or so. There is 11 months, a little over 11 months left in the year, which comes out to about an average of 2,546 new subscribers every month or 83 new subscribers every day. And right now I'm getting on average around 42 or 43 subscribers. So I need to grow a quite a bit more to hit this goal here. But vanity goals, the reason I say vanity goals, because this is where most people stop, right? They just, they put the amount of subscribers they want and they don't have an exact action plan to hit that. So I'm going to cover that in this video here. So the topics I'm going to talk about are entrepreneurship, email marketing and copywriting, info products and digital products, building an audience, and just all around ways to make money online, right? Internet income. These are the topics that I talk about on basically all of my different social media channels in my email list. So this is what I'll be talking about on my YouTube channel as well. And the topics that my videos will be around. Now my action plan for hitting my vanity goal of 50,000 subscribers is broken down right here. So right now I post mostly two videos a week, but sometimes I'll miss a video. I try to post at least once per week. And that's what I want to do this year. I want to continue doing that. So every Monday and Wednesday, I'm typically posting a video and I'm usually filming it and editing the week before. So one to two videos a week, every Monday and Wednesday. And then I film and edit the videos and schedule them out every Friday. So I have a schedule now to do this. I didn't have the most organized schedule last year, but now I do all the filming and editing on my videos on one day and I schedule it out that same day.  The next thing I want, I'm going to do is I'm going to continue to use vidIQ. This is a software that I use to find keywords and video ideas. And I'm going to do this every Wednesday. So this is vidIQ right here. I'll link to it below. It's a, it's a paid product, but they also have a free plan, I believe. And it's really cool for coming up with daily ideas for my videos. I can't remember what plan I'm on here, but I can look at this and I can get good ideas of what to create my videos around right based on my channel and the topics on my channel. What I can also do is go to keywords here and I can, you see there's, there's some recommended keyword opportunities here, but I can type in something on my own, right? Like digital products and I can see, let's, let's type that in here. I can see like the score and if it would be good for me to create a video around. So you can see here digital products, this is I think monthly search volume. This is I think monthly search volume. Yeah, it is monthly search. So 105,136 views, low competition. So this is a topic or keyword that I'm going to start creating more content around because this is good. I like to look for scores of like 65 and higher. So this is solid, right? 70 overall score in vidIQ, decent search volume, right? 105,000 views every month. And this is actually how I rank number one or I think I rank number one for Twitter marketing. So I found Twitter marketing in this tool. You can see 76 overall score, very low competition. And it also gives you more keyword ideas that go along with this, right? So some longer tail keywords like Twitter marketing tips, social media marketing, and you can also search by the overall score here. So if I want to go by the highest score, you can see all these opportunities here. We got Alex Berman, a friend of mine on Twitter, email marketing. This is a really good one right here, 439,000 monthly searches, very low competition with a score of 77. So I'm going to be using this tool a lot more. I did use this in 2021 but I didn't have a organized process around it. I would more so just go in and look when I was feeling like it. So I'm going to use this every Wednesday to come up with video ideas to film on Friday to post the following week. So this is vidIQ. I'll link to it below. It'll be an affiliate link because it's a paid product and I love this product. But this is how I come up with the video ideas. Another way you can come up with video ideas is to go to somebody's channel. So I'll just go to let's just use my channel for an example. So I'll go to a competitor's channel and I'll sort by most popular. And I can see like the most popular, my Twitter marketing video, I think I ranked number one for this still, is my most viewed video 10 months ago, 117,000 views. And so if I see somebody else's channel where they have this many views and I only have 21,500 subscribers. So the views are like four or five times higher than my subscribers, which means it's a good topic to create a video around. So that's another way that I will come up with keyword ideas and video topic ideas. So that is vidIQ, finding keywords and video ideas. I'm going to do this every Wednesday, spend a few hours doing that. And as far as content, I'm going to try to alternate between these three types of content. So we got evergreen content, which is content that is going to be relevant for a long period of time, right? So I can create something around like cold email strategies or copywriting, things that aren't going to go out of style within like a month or a week, right? So topics that people can watch the video a year, two years later and it's still relevant. That's evergreen content. Second type is trending content. So I haven't done too much of this, although I want to. So trending content, last year we had or the year before that stimulus checks, right? And that was like a super, super hot topic on YouTube. So that's an example of trending content. It's not really a hot topic anymore. But if you catch these trends at the right time, like this one right here, my second most viewed video drop servicing, that was a trend at one point. I think it still has decent search volume, but at one point it was trending really high. So I created a video around that. So I want to find these trending topics and you can do it through like the explore page here. You can just do it by looking at news articles and headlines and creating something around that. The tricky part for me is I run a business channel. So not everything I'm going to be able to talk about in the trending topic. So that's why I haven't done it too much so far, but I do want to start finding more of these trending topics and tying my content or creating videos around that to benefit from that trending traffic. So that's trending content or videos or topics that are hot right now but not going to be hot like in a week or two weeks or a month down the road. And then lastly some personal content. So this is just content like stories about me or things that are happening in my life and maybe like a day in the life or like a review video of like something I use. So I haven't done this too much either but I want to start doing this more. Let me see if I can find an example of that. This right here could be considered personal content right. So my million dollar game plan for 2022 to get a million dollars in profit in my online business this year. Let's see if we can find another one here. Right here stop being cheap right. So this is like a personal content style video and it just shares a story about me how I grew up cheap. I grew up with this broke mindset. I was always trying to save money and I break it down in this video why being cheap is actually bad.  So this is an example of personal content. Evergreen content is uh let's see. Evergreen content would be I guess a lot of this is evergreen content because it's going to be relevant down the road but make money on Twitter. That's probably evergreen content because people are always searching for Twitter and how to make money online. Three skills to make you rich. I'm growing your email list avoiding broke clients like these are all evergreen content topics because they're going to be relevant a year from now two years from now. And then trending content I don't have too much of that but I guess you could call my most viewed video actually trending content but it's a mixture of trending and evergreen right because this is grow fast on Twitter and it's actually for 2021 but it's actually still relevant for this year too. So those are the different content types I'm going to use evergreen trending personal content and also another thing I'm going to do is add a description to every video with links to my free and paid offerings. So YouTube actually has a setting where you can have you can upload or copy and paste a description so it's automatically uploaded to every video so I've already done that let's see if I can bring it up right here I added it to a few of my most viewed videos but you can see in the description here and this is another reason why YouTube is pretty cool is they're not going to penalize you on reach if you add a ton of links here so you can see here I have my paid offerings right here work with me and I also have my free offerings here for my free materials like my free course right here at www.SeanAnthony.co my free Facebook group email marketing rain makers subscribe to my channel and then follow me on Twitter so all of my links to all of my free and paid offers are in the description and this is posted automatically now. So if I go out of here that's my action plan right one to two videos a week on Monday and Wednesday film and edit on Friday find keywords and video ideas on Wednesday to film and edit on Friday alternate between evergreen trending and personal content and add a description to every video with links to my free and paid offers that is the exact action plan I'm going to follow to hit this number right here 50,000 subscribers in 2022 now some mistakes from 2021 that helped me to come up with this action plan the first thing was I focused on quantity over quality so I was actually dragging my feet a lot during some weeks and I just didn't want to make a video I was just creating a video just to hit that quota and I was just focused on quantity over quality and I think it has a lot to do with me not spending enough time researching video topics and keyword ideas so that's where these two come in right just using vidIQ and my my consistent schedule with this so if I spend more time researching video topics and ideas I think that I'll have a lot more higher quality of videos because I'll have more of a structure around what the video should be around and also guidance on the type of topic or video idea evergreen trending or personal content the third thing was I didn't have an organized schedule for filming and editing for about half the year around July or so I started filming and editing on Friday and scheduling it out for the next week but up until then like five or six months or so I didn't have a really organized schedule so I was just filming on Friday one day and Wednesday the other day and Thursday the other day so it's all over the place and maybe not want to do it so now that I have a more organized schedule for filming and editing and coming up with ideas it's a lot easier for me to just go and do it the fourth thing is I went off the cuff too much during some videos so now I'm going to spend more time scripting my videos out or at least putting in the main points I'll show you real quick what I used to do that I have this quote this tool called Notion it's a free tool and you can see here I have video ideas here for what I can create videos around so FAQs or basic tutorials or how-to series or answering comments so I have a bunch of video ideas like the hooks for the video when I combine it with the video topic and then I also have the scripting section so these are all my completed videos here and basically I script out the intro like what I want to say the main points in the video that I want to cover so you can see it here and then the conclusion so I don't script this out word for word this video I scripted out more than I usually do but I want the main points in here the main talking point so I know exactly what to follow so in 2021 I didn't do that too much I mainly had like an idea like just three sentences like here talk about this and I would just go off the cuff and some videos you can kind of tell right I ramble and some videos I just talk a little too long and I went off the cuff and that caused me to have these longer videos that would bore some people right and get people to click off so I want to have more structured videos it's not completely scripted but I want to have the main points and the main talking points listed out here on Notion so that I can know exactly what to follow what to say in my videos so that was a mistake that I made in 2021 that'll be fixing this year and also I didn't have links to my paid offers in my descriptions so most of the links were to my my Facebook group and my free offers but I also want to have my paid offers linked here because I have a lot of people who ask I have a lot of people who look and message me directly like hey what products do you have to for us to buy or to sign up for and so I'll just have it here so people can sign up and see it on their own so those are the main mistakes from 2021 that I'm fixing and how I created this action plan was was wanting to solve these mistakes and some 2022 non negotiables what are things that I must do this year aside from the action plan here so my videos first of all must deliver value in the form of an insight wisdom lesson or entertainment my videos have to focus on quality over quantity and you're probably going to notice a lot of these are just the opposite of what I listed up here the mistakes my videos will always send people to the next step so at the end of every video I'm telling people to either watch another video or to check out a product or to go to my free Facebook group at email rain maker com you'll notice that if you watch my videos so my videos always have to send people to the next step I'm never going to just say hey that's it for this video I'll see you later I want to send them and tell them exactly what to do after watching the video my videos also must get the reader to think or behave differently right we do that by delivering an insight wisdom lesson lesson or piece of entertainment and then also I need to follow the action plan every day and week and month the action plan is laid out here very easy and simple to follow this now that I have it laid out and those are my non negotiables I need to be doing these things day in and day out weekend and week out month after month and with all of my videos here so this is my 2022 youtube growth plan I personally love youtube it's a lot more work than other channels but I have videos from two years ago when I first started posting that are still getting views that are still getting subscribers that are still getting ad revenue from google ladsense and getting new customers into my business every day so these videos you can make a video like a year ago or two years ago and it can continue to get views for years and years and years and there's no other platform that can really do that so I love youtube it's more work but I would say that maybe 30 to 40 percent of my business comes from youtube either directly or indirectly people watch a video they want to learn more they buy my product but my youtube my youtube channel is a huge part of my business so if you're thinking of starting a youtube channel this year which I definitely recommend if you've been thinking about it follow this growth plan you can copy it and just basically change out the topics and the action plan based on your situation and start and grow your youtube channel this year so if you enjoyed this video you got value out of it give it a like and let me know in the comments if you're starting a youtube channel this year and if you want to stay up to date on all of my videos make sure you hit the subscribe button on that bell icon so you don't miss any of my future videos and that's it for this video I will see you in the next one take it easy