People are not stressed because they have children. This is not because of marriage, this is not because of B school, this is not because of employment. So don't blame yourself for anybody's suffering. They're like that, they're practiced. Many have become veterans in suffering. Well, you should have this kind of freedom, isn't it so? Huh? Even if I go to hell, I will live well. Actually, many parents in India, they have tension about their child about fees, 1 lakh, 2 lakh, how shall I pay this, then I'll become a beggar, what shall I do? Hey, if you were a beggar, there would be no problem with 1 lakh, 2 lakh. Then they have a peaceful life, then the parent says to the child, I have a very beautiful life, enjoyment. Then after that, we think that how do they live happily because they have these many tensions about the child? That what do they do? How will they fall? Why will they kick someone and all that? Then how do they still have a peaceful life? The parents. Yes, yes, go on. How do they still have enjoyment in their life by having a tension still for the kid? Some parents manage to forget about their children for some time. That gives them the respite.  What's your name? Sanjana. Sanjana? Sanjana. I want you to observe, not just your parents, just observe people around you. Just watch them carefully. Because this is all I did in my life when I was your age, simply observing everything, not saying a word about it. If you observe people, you will see today we are creating a world. Toddler means they have, you know, the napkin problems. Adolescent means they have puberty problems. Middle age means it's a crisis. Old age, terrible. Tell me one stage of life that people are enjoying. Those who are poor, suffering because they are poor. Those who are rich, they are suffering, the taxes. Those who are not educated, they are suffering because they are not educated. Put them to school, enormous suffering. That's what they're saying, tension in the B school. And those who are not married, they're suffering. Get them married. So I did not say anything. They're saying it. No children, they're suffering. Give them children, constant suffering, which you are saying.  So somebody comes out with a seal of philosophy, life is suffering. So somebody comes up with a solution, it's all right to suffer. If you suffer a lot here, you will go to another place where everything is fantastic. You heard of heaven? You haven't been there, right? Heaven. Heaven is the most fantastic place. The reason why we suffer is there, everything is fantastic. But I'm asking, do you have any proof that you are not already in heaven and messing it up? Hello? Do you have any proof that you are not already in heaven and making a mess out of it? Just go out and see, I think it feels like heaven, the B school. Maybe you making a mess out of it. Look at this planet, from outside the solar system, look at this planet, all the other planets and planet earth. Does it look like heaven? So you already landed on heaven and making an absolute mess about it and you want to go to another heaven now because you made a mess out of this. So people are not stressed because they have children. They don't have children, they are continuously miserable. Children came little bit spurts of joy, rest is only crying about it. So this is not because of children, this is not because of marriage, this is not because of B school, this is not because of employment. This is simply because human beings have not figured how to handle themselves, that's all.  Yes? Yes or no? People have become risen into very high positions, still miserable or no? So this is not because of any situation, definitely not because of a wonderful girl like you. They haven't figured because right from the day they went to kindergarten, they were focused who is first, who is second, who is first, who is second. Yesterday I was at my school, after forty-five years I went back to my school. How does it feel? How do you think? So I went there and I was just telling them my experience of school. When I went to school, you know this monthly mox cart, when this mox cart comes, when the teacher gives it to them, some look at it and they are strutting around because they are first, second, whatever. Some are sitting in one corner and crying because they are not happy with the numbers that they got. I never opened the mox cart in my entire school. When they gave it to me, I took it and gave it to my father. He blew. I couldn't understand why just this cart. I never opened it and saw because I thought this is a transaction between my teacher and him. I had no interest in it whatsoever. So I never bothered but I always saw it. My father is a well-educated intelligent man but it disturbed him. For three days he blew like a volcano. Looking at this yellow cord, they always give a yellow colored cord. Still like that? So I was wondering, three days volcanic experience is having. Why I'm saying this is we have set this kind of things. We can't send the entire system tomorrow morning but we can change ourselves, how we handle this, isn't it? Why is it so important that you have to be ahead of somebody? Why? Why is it so important? Is it not important your life should be beautiful? You must be joyful, you must be wonderful, you must explore your full potential. Is this important or you want to be better than somebody sitting next to you?  Yes? That's not how life should end up. So don't blame yourself for anybody's suffering.   You never blame yourself for somebody's misery, okay, it's all right. What to do? It's individual choice, huh, yes or no? Outside people, what can we do? What can I do to you? I can create an easy situation or a difficult situation for you. Suffering is your business, isn't it? Yes or no? Suffering is your business.  You must be a little challenging for them. So whether they enjoy the challenge or suffer the challenge is left to them, am I okay? Because what I see is, it doesn't matter how many arrangements you make, those who suffer anyway suffer, isn't it? Just see the western countries as an example. What everybody is dreaming of or what even people don't dare to dream here, an average American citizen has. You think they're all bursting with joy? All the arrangements have been made. You think they're bursting in joy? No misery, 42% of population over forty-five is on, you know, psychiatric medication. So this is not joy for sure. Even mental health is not being managed because just making external arrangements is not going to fix this life. It's very, very important that you make inner arrangements that even if they send you to hell, you will go joyfully. You heard of Gautama, the Buddha, you would have Buddha? When everybody was talking about going to heaven, Gautama said, what will I go and do in heaven? Because you say everything is wonderful there, what will I do there?  Because you say everybody is suffering there, let me go and do something because anyway I cannot suffer. I made myself like this, I cannot suffer.  Even now the Buddhists texts talk about Buddha being in the lower world, well, you should have this kind of freedom, isn't it so? Huh? Even if I go to hell, I will live well. Nobody has to send me to heaven.


Well, thanks guys, a huge honor to be here. So here's my pitch. Why don't we act like I gave my talk and then we all go watch Chris Masterjohn's talk. Show of hands? Okay, we've got a couple of hands. Okay, I guess you guys are gonna hold my feet at the fire and we'll really do this thing. So thank you so much for having me here. Almost 20 years ago now is when I entered into this whole ancestral health scene and funny enough, it was in Seattle. I was up here contemplating either a natural path route or a medical school route. And during this time, my health pretty much cratered and it was in discovering kind of the inner workings of sleep, circadian rhythm, food, community, exercise that I started to piece my health back together. And so for you guys, this talk, a lot of it won't be particularly new. Some of it may be, but I think that kind of the angle that's in it may be really powerful if you are a healthcare provider, if you are a coach. How many folks in here do their day-to-day life helping other people? Okay, so a lot of folks. So you might get some pretty good efficacy out of this in that regard. So for the most part, when we interface with people, the big concerns that people have are generally, weight and aesthetics, health, performance, longevity. I can't really think of too many other buckets that we could drop people into. Those tend to be the big primary concerns. But when we're trying to help people with this stuff, we need some sort of a rubric or a plan for how we're gonna tackle things. We need to figure out how we're gonna solve a specific problem. So check this image out. Really look close at that. Okay, so the way I found this, I put into a search engine wrong way to fix a problem. And now depending on how desperate you are, I don't know what they have plugged in here. Like clearly this was a very compelling situation that they had to gerry-rig this thing such that they could have burned the whole operation down. But clearly not the best way to fix a problem, right? I think we could all agree on that. Okay, let's look at some problems that we're all facing here. So you guys are all familiar with this type of stuff. Essentially exponential increases, no obesity rates, type two diabetes, and all the diabetes related issues, all these things are increasing at exponential rates, cost and frequency of Alzheimer's. And what's the solutions that we're offered? We're basically given two mainstream solutions. The first one is eat less, move more. The second one, everything in moderation. Would you guys agree with that? This is the mantra, these are the solutions. If you have health problems that are related to overeating or sedentism or what have you, these are the options. Eat less, move more, everything in moderation. Let me ask you this. Where does eat less, move more, everything in moderation exist here? And this is kind of the salty crunchy aisle. If you don't like the salty crunchy aisle, how about the sweet aisle? I don't really like the sweet stuff all that much, but if you move me down an aisle of potato chips, I will push down an old woman, use her spine as a springboard to jump and get the last bag of sea salt and vinegar potato chips. So this is just, this is our situation. From what I can look at, there is no eat less, move more, no everything in moderation, except in two places. It's two places that this does really exist. The first is a metabolic ward setting. Metabolic ward setting is effectively prison, needs a hospital, you don't get the shower perks. There's kind of a slow response on that. Maybe needed more coffee at this thing, but so everything in the metabolic ward, they weigh and measure all the food coming in. They literally frisk people to make sure that they're not sneaking in food.  It's a full input output analysis. So in this setting, eat less, move more, everything in moderation works because they completely control the inputs and they scrutinize the outputs. There's one other place that eat less, move more, everything in moderation works. Anybody remember that? Fantasy Island, so those are the places that eat less, move more, everything in moderation works. And I say that, how much do we know today about type two diabetes versus what we knew 20 years ago? Do we know more today? We know infinitely more, virtually infinite. I believe in 2013 alone, there were 30,000 peer reviewed papers with type two diabetes in the title to some degree. Now granted, the quality of this type of research can vary, but I mean, there's been an enormous increase in our understanding of the gut microbiome, of genetics, epigenetics. So we know more about these problems than we've ever known in the past, but yet we can't seem to affect any type of really qualitative change. Just a few other bummer type statistics. I can see who is at least out of my age cohort when they recognize the graphics that I put in here. This is from airplane. Yeah, just shows how old I am at this point, but 108 million people in the US try a diet every year. Virtually all of them fail, fail being that they don't meet the kind of goal with regards to weight and health. 220,000 morbidly obese people had a gastric bypass in 2009 with an average cost of between $15,000 and $35,000 a person. So I don't really see a whole lot of success with the standard of care. Every once in a while somebody gets in and they ask a good question, well, why? Why is this situation the way that it is? But the common response tends to be an immediate bounce to this kind of moralization of the situation. We're just broken. There's something just wrong with us. Just to push a ways from the table and then that will solve all of the issues. But again, what if that table is the snack aisle of the supermarket? Like how do you moderate that stuff? Do we just lack moral fiber? If we were just better human beings, if we could just be better people then everything would be fine. Then there's this notion, people are just lazy. And we are, but that's actually something that was successful in the past and is maladaptive today, but we don't have that perspective to really understand that. So we vilify people and it leads to enormous shame. There was just a really tragic story of a beautiful young woman who ended up committing suicide recently because of social media shaming. And I mean, she was not overweight in the least by anybody's standards, but this kind of societal pressure that we have and this lack of understanding about why we just fundamentally are as humans leads to some really profound situations of loss and suffering. And then maybe we start asking some more granular questions. So we get into the most controversial of topics, are we eating too many carbs, too much fat, too much protein, the macronutrient war. So we've been in this thing for 60 years now and if you want to guarantee that anything goes on at Infanitem, you declare war against it and then it goes on forever. So we've been in these macronutrient wars and people will get all kinds of frisky and fired up about this. They will say that we've eaten more protein carbs or fat in the last couple of years, relative to previously and that is the sole cause of the obesity epidemic. But if you talk to Stephen Guine and you talk to some other folks, this is kind of hard to support when you look at just the ratios of the macronutrients that we've eaten. And we have some interesting anthropological examples of people who've eaten on the very low carb side of things historically who are quite healthy, the Inuit being an example. And then we have populations like the Katavans who've eaten an exceptionally high carb diet. And I love the Katavans, they're such a great example. When you break down their diet, they eat a 60 to 70% carbohydrate diet. They eat significant amounts of pork and saturated fat. And what's the other? They smoke like chimneys.  If you're into the China study model, the fact that they eat pork and animal products, they should be dead. And if you're in the low carb jihadi group, they should be dead from that too.  So this whole notion that it's just protein, just carbs, just fat, it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny or just looking at some basic anthropological observations. But man, when we start asking, what about calories? Are we eating too many calories? And we start getting a, yeah, and it's not just that we are eating too many calories. This is a graph of the available food in our system, the amount of food that's available to us. And what this really boils down to is novelty. We have more options with regards to our food than we've ever had in history. And when we understand the way that our neurophysiology, our neurobiology is wired to regulate our appetite, this starts making some sense. So American supermarket stock over 50,000 food-like items each year, about 11,000 new items are introduced. What I would propose is that it's novelty, not a lack of moral fiber or moral substance. And the crazy used car salesman pitch that I'll throw out there is that the forces that made us who we are may be working against us today. Does that seem crazy over the top? Maybe the thing that made us successful in the past may be working at odds today. So we have two interconnected factors that forged essentially who we are. These two factors, the first part is optimum foraging strategy, optimum foraging models argue that an organism will select the nutrients that give the greatest benefit for the least energy expended. This is basic thermodynamics. If you spend more energy trying to acquire nutrients, at some point, that's gonna become a zero sum game.  So woven into our genetics is kind of a game theory programming that we must find more nutrition with regards to vital nutrients and also total caloric load than what we burn in the acquisition of that process.  And when we look at anything from crickets to lizards to humans to sharks, this optimum foraging strategy is a great modeling of how we balance that acquisition of nutrients versus the expenditure of calories so that we're always in a caloric excess. So this really flies in the face of much of what we're told too that we need to try to program in some sort of a caloric deficit. Maybe we do in this modern world, but we really don't understand the underpinnings of why. So the second piece that plays into this, and this is kind of like a dueling banjos against the optimum foraging strategy is pallet fatigue. And within the pallet fatigue, the strategy of paleolithic foragers was to eat small amounts of various foods. To decrease the impact of toxin pathogens, but also to diversify the nutrient intake. So on the one hand, we have a drive to eat everything that's not nailed down, but then on the other hand, we have a tendency to get bored of that food and get bored of it quickly and there's really good reasons for that. If we ate too much of one type of food, we could get exposed to a toxic level of anti-nutrients, for example, and also we might end up with a nutrient deficiency. So a variety literally is a spice of life and this is pulling from a paper which I will reference at the end, but eating a variety of foods made it more likely that the species will get a balanced diet. That includes the required micronutrients that's simultaneously limiting the toxins ingested. And boredom is built in. This pallet fatigue phenomena is a really interesting thing that we can use both to our benefit and our detriment and I'll show you some examples of that. So again, the crazy, greasy, used car sales and pitch that I would make is that we have great wiring but really bad timing. The novelty that involves ancient areas of the brain which are largely superseding our logical forebrain and people will know that they should do something but they're driven by an emotive process which is survival. And it's interesting that we would not begrudge anyone if they fell into a creek and they were drowning.  That wouldn't be extraordinary, would it? No, it's totally reasonable but the desire to eat all the food is a similar survival mechanism and when you think through our evolutionary past it really can't be any other way but yet we will vilify the overeater but excuse the person who is saving themselves from drowning with their evolutionarily driven survival mechanisms. Ultraprocessing can introduce tremendous variety in the diet. The abundant variety of the meal bypasses the brain's sensory specific satiety thus avoiding palate fatigue. Basically, highly processed foods can really circumvent the tendency for us to say, okay, enough's enough and I'm gonna show you a really fascinating example of that here in just a few minutes. In a world of plenty, a varied diet may in fact be maladaptive, stimulating appetite thus promoting excessive eating. Variety produces the dessert effect in which a satiated eater will rekindle their appetite when presented dessert which is so different from the meal foods making them palatable. So how many times have we been there and we ate a great meal there was some pork loin and Brussels sprouts and cooked in bacon and all this stuff and you're like, oh man, I'm stuffed and then somebody brings out some sort of a dessert and you're like, well, I guess I'm not that stuffed and so this is a great example of that. What's happening here is we're switching up the palate inputs in a way that even though our senses which are regulated at the gut, at a hormonal level, at the brain level, that may be saturated or at a spot where it's like it's sending all the signals of enough, I'm full and then we change that palate experience enough and then we can eat more food. It's very easy to do. And what's the delay's potato chip deal? Bet you can't eat just one. I'll take that bet all day long. Studies in animals and humans show that increasing consumption when there is more variety in a meal or diet this variety should be noted as based on added fat, sugar, salt, spices, shape and texture. So this is an interesting thing that even within the context of say like ancestral eating just introducing some alterations in texture and seasonings. How many of you folks are familiar with my food matrix? That was actually an attempt at taking good food and introducing enough variety so that people would be comfortable with eating chicken and pork loin and stuff like that in a more continual basis by switching up spices and cooking methods and whatnot. But clearly we can take this to a possibly maladaptive level. Okay, so this thing is pretty cool and really the whole talk could have been this next minute and a half video and then we could have really ran in and watched Chris Masterjohn. So this is Adam Rickman, man versus food and what he's getting ready to take on is called the Kitchen Sink Challenge. It's an eight pound ice cream sundae and you have to eat it in a specific amount of time. I think it's 30 minutes or 45 minutes for you to win. I don't know what you win. Is it like 5,000 units of insulin or something and never really detailed that. But I want you to watch what he does, what happens to him partway through eating this ice cream and what does he do to win this challenge? Check this out and hopefully this thing plays. Fueled by San Francisco's energy and support, I'm feeling fine. But then the magnitude of what I am eating hits me. This is crazy. I am experiencing sweetness overload.  Frantic to stop the sugary tide from rising. I make a desperate play.  I'm salty to break it up. Thank you. Right now all the orange is starting to get to me. I think the more I can appreciate each bite, I got a better chance of rocking this one. I cautiously eat a few fries. The strategy works for now and I resume my epic ice cream battle. Holy cats. Okay, so what happened there? What happened? This guy's eating a massive amount of ice cream. Who would argue that an ice cream sundae doesn't taste great? Probably tastes pretty good. Orange ice cream, I don't know. That's a little weird, but an ice cream sundae, I think we could label as a hyper palatable food. It's very tasty food. But after three and a half or four pounds, he was about halfway through, this is a shorter video clip. There's a longer video that's like five minutes that the Food Network has and you can see him, he tries to put a spoonful of the ice cream down and he's green and he wretches. He almost throws up and so if he throws up, the deal's done. He lost the kitchen sink challenge. So he is at such a profound moment of palate fatigue that eating more ice cream literally is making him want to be physically ill. What does he do to get through this? He orders extra salty, extra crunchy French fries and he eats a French fry, which that salty, crunchy savory is about as different from the sweet, cold, creamy experience of the ice cream. And this is something that just, usually I use this talk more for kind of mainstream hospital and registered dietetics tracks, which you'll see in a little bit, it ends up pissing them off pretty thoroughly at the end of it. But this makes them crazy because how does he succeed in this situation? He ate more food to just eat the initial food that he was gonna eat. That plate of French fries is probably about 1,500 calories alone. Do you guys get that? He could not eat the ice cream had he not also eaten the French fries. And the way that we eat, the way that much of our world eats is like professional eaters. This is a professional eating strategy. If you poke around some of the professional eating websites, they have all these different food pairings. Well, if you need to eat 70 hot dogs and you should pair it with gummy bears and they have all these different things figured out and this is the way that we inadvertently construct most of our meals. And I live in Reno, Nevada. There's a buffet on every corner and you walk into these things and there's every option you could ever dream of. There's sushi over here, and Mexican food there, and Italian food there. And man, you can put away some chow when you go to these places because it's literally almost infinite palette options that you experience. So the modern world offers limitless food options. The food is engineered to be hyper palatable. I don't think anybody could argue with that. Like there are a number of food scientists that would otherwise be out doing drug labs or something if they weren't engineering this food. Our ancient wiring is now a liability and the medical recommendation and moderation, I wouldn't even say so much fail but are actively working against us and we'll take a gander under the hood at that. So this came up Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Hi, my name is Mariana. I have type two diabetes and I could eat chocolate. Well Mariana, you could eat depleted uranium if you wanted to also but it's not gonna be particularly healthy for you. So these are the gatekeepers. And this is where when I'm presenting this to a hospital system they get super mad and they don't realize what demon they've let loose into their midst. But these are the gatekeepers. These are the people in charge of taking care of people and they put out stuff like this. Now this one is kind of benign because I could say okay well, 90% dark chocolate, kick your heels up, no problem. Check this other one out. This is from the American Diabetes Association Facebook page. It was their satisfy your sweet tooth recipe and the recipe was one cup of rice, one can of sweetened condensed milk, two tablespoons of honey, and then a dash of cinnamon. Why the cinnamon? Because it lowers blood sugar. Yeah, because it lowers blood sugar. So this thing hit social media and it went crazy. It just went, these people got roasted at the steak and they took the thing down and they had kind of a mea culpa like well, we didn't provide context about amounts and ratios and all that type of stuff. And when we know anything about the type two diabetic situation in insulin resistance and yes, you can food restrict somebody again in a metabolic ward setting and stick them on a high carbohydrate diet and we will probably reverse the signs and symptoms of type two diabetes but we literally need to starve the person. Whereas if we just remove the insulting macronutrient which is carbohydrates and these insulin resistant individuals, we pretty miraculously get a resolution of the problem. So these are the gatekeepers that are telling us eat less, move more, everything at moderation. And as this ancestral health message has grown and it's kind of infiltrated out further and further, what's being done is that they are turning good eating into disordered eating is being called orthorexia. Any attempt at good eating is effectively given what ICD-10 code now and so you are disordered eater, subcategory ancestral health, subcategory ketogenic. And so this is the response. What's the standard dietetics model? Have a little of everything, exclude nothing. Every single study to date shows that that approach fails and it doesn't matter if it's like cabbage soup diet, cookie diet, paleo, Atkins, you name it, any other nutritional approach that's been tested head to head with the have a little bit of everything, the little bit of everything fails again and again and again, but it's still the kind of standard of care. Excluding food groups is orthorexia. And I would argue that actually some exclusion of food groups is the only way that we are ever going to effectively navigate this whole problem and make that point down at the bottom, some degree of food avoidance maybe necessary to navigate the modern food forest. I love this quote. And again, I just kind of throw this stuff out there as there are folks that do fine on the moderate approach, but that is not the vast majority of people. At a minimum, if you get into some of Gretchen Rubin's work where she talks about abstainers and moderators, perhaps 50% of the people are abstainers. If they are going to succeed in some sort of a dietary change, they need to draw a line in the sand and they say there's not a safe limit with that. For some alcoholics, they can have a drink. For other alcoholics, they can't even do herbal tinctures because it's an alcohol. So orthorexia is nutritional self-defense. Palate fatigue and simple meals are the foundation of our omnivore past. Maybe requisite to maintaining normal health today. This is a very controversial topic if you're in a mainstream hospital setting. So I would make this point.  You've done nothing wrong. You've in fact done everything right. You are liberated. I used to have a Thelma and Louise picture on that with the car driving off the ledge, but it's like copyrighted or something, so I couldn't use that one. But we still have some work to do. Even though we're liberated from this on an intellectual level, we need to have some strategies about what to do next. And I love this Van Gogh quote, even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get back up again. That's gotta be the approach that we take both with ourselves and with our clients that it's not about perfection, it's about just getting back on track. If we had one meal off rails, we're only one meal away from getting back on. If we had one night of bad sleep, we're only one night away from getting back on track with that. So what can you do? This is where you guys... Yeah, I told you we should have gone to watch Chris Masterjohn. I told you guys. Let's see if I can jam through. Pretty close. And so this is the stuff that you guys know a ton of. But something that I think would be really powerful for folks that are running clinical practices, working with people, talking to folks about this omnivores real dilemma that we are wired to eat more and move less. That is our normal biological state, the exact opposite of what we're being told to do on kind of an implementation basis. We need to figure out how to use something like the food matrix to get enough variety so that people don't want to shoot themselves because they're so bored with the food that's in front of them, but not so much variety that we get into that professional eating kind of strategy. Factors that govern our neural regulation of appetite, food, sleep, and specifically circadian rhythm and photo period, I honestly think that part is perhaps more important than any other element in our lives at this point. I'm getting more and more driven towards that circadian rhythm piece. Community is enormous. We now understand that inadequate community is as big a stress and as big an impact on our health as a pack-a-day smoking habit and the movement. I highly recommend a 30-day reset for folks. It's long enough to get great success. It's short enough that you can guilt people into giving it a shot, and usually it'll get some pretty good progress with that. Whole 30 is a great example of something that's just gone enormously large and successful and recommending an approach similar to this. We focus on largely whole-on processed foods, eat these simple meals, eat them to society. This is my food matrix example, which I think is pretty cool. If we took the chicken breast, I'm super afraid that I was making that thing fail, but if you go chicken breast and then vegetable asparagus, and then what do we have?  See how that goes? On this page alone, there are 80,000 different meals that are potential options there. Now, some of them are gonna be a dog. Let's see here. Bass cooked with beets in all spice and lard. In all spice and lard. I might pass on that one, but who knows? Maybe somebody will like that.  Everybody's pretty familiar with this type of stuff. Community, this is why I love martial arts, and even things like CrossFit. If the CrossFit is well run, a good CrossFit gym will talk to you about sleep, food, exercise is kind of the reason why you're there and community is just baked in the cake. So I really like that stuff. Movement, get outdoors as much as possible. CrossFit yoga, dance, martial arts, I'm a big Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy. Gives you a chance to hug people and choke them also, which is great. So it's not about morality or stupidity or laziness, it's novelty. And thank you guys so much for having me here and look forward to seeing more of what's going on. And who knows, maybe Chris Masterjohn is still talking. We can sneak over there and see some slack. Is there a Q and A sec? Peace? Okay, okay. Okay, and I have no idea how that's run. Is there a microphone or folks just jumping up or? Maybe people can come up to the mic line up over here. That'd be easier than running around trying to hand out. If there's no questions, we can go do something. I have not given a hue, who asked that question? Could you raise your hand? I think that's a really fascinating topic and by no means well steeped in the neurophysiology of how music is interpreted. It's a fascinating topic for me just in that where does that even come from? Where does the creativity of that process come from and music and music theory? I am not qualified to really comment on it, but I would say music potentially has enormous effects on our state of wellbeing, happiness. I've noticed that I listened to far too many podcasts and far too little Soundgarden radio on Amazon Prime and when I listened to more of that, I'm much happier than listening to the gloom and doom of podcasts for the most part. Pardon? Absolutely, I mean, if you listen to music, you typically dance, so yeah, yeah. So apparently if to get everybody on mic, I either have to pass this around or you can repeat the question. Okay, we could do that, we could do that. Okay, I'll do a question repeat. You just need to project. Why don't I just bring the mic over here, maybe it's easier. We're figuring this out as we go folks. Hi Rob, I was wondering if you have an opinion on like paleo foods like granola and things like that cause I find that those for me are hyper palatable as well and I can't stop eating them so it's better for me to just avoid them. So I don't know if you have anything to say about those types of foods. I'm hard pressed to improve on what you just said. Okay, I guess maybe it wasn't a question. For me, I'm super gluten intolerant and it's really a bummer to go out to eat, spend a decent amount of money on the meal and then spend the next two or three hours in the washroom. So the development of all these gluten-free options like just being able to have a birthday cake now that doesn't poison me is amazing but those things are easily hyper palatable. Even back in 2001 when Lauren Cordain wrote his first book, this was super early and very few people were doing like date almond, nut cluster type things but even in 2001 he warned in the back of the book yet these are technically paleo foods but you can easily overeat these and he didn't couch it in terms of specifically like hyper palatability but even then when there was no one doing this stuff yet and none of the kind of like epic bar and all these things which I think are incredible. They're really amazing but you can get yourself in trouble with them without a doubt. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Hey, nice, nice, nice hearing from you. Love your humor. I just want to say real quick a Dunbar's book on human evolution on the question of musicality talks about human brain size and how we're wired to be around 150 people. Most people know that Dunbar's number but musicality, laughing, feasting was a way for us to groom larger numbers when we didn't have time in smaller groups. So you might check out that book. A clarification question. So are you saying novelty is driving caloric intake? Yes, largely. If you have more, on average, in a given situation if you have more food options, greater novelty you will tend to eat more food. Yeah. Okay, because I'm also, yeah, so okay. I'm not sure I'm convinced yet and I'm wondering if there's something underneath novelty that also exists like convenience?  So to me it's almost as much convenience as it is novelty that there's just so much available and because yeah, I'm just not yet convinced. So can you convince me that novelty is driving that or say it one more time? I mean when we couch it from these two elements which are really foundational in evolutionary biology which is optimum foraging strategy plus pallet fatigue. So the optimum foraging strategy is driving us to get as much as we can expanding as little as possible which totally corroborates with what you're talking about with regards to convenience. And this is something that Steffan DNA talks about at very great length and is much more of an expert on than I am. So it kind of dovetails in all of the convenience elements. That is the foundational elements of optimum foraging strategy, but even within that if you had a giant pile of Twinkies here at some point that would be incredibly convenient but you will get bored of that via pallet fatigue and cease eating it at some point. Now I might have to go a mile away to find the next food item, but if I know that okay there's Twinkies here but ding-dongs over there, I will walk that mile to go get it even though it's not convenient because the difference is the loosening of that pallet fatigue and that's where the novelty comes in. And we see this a lot in like a Robert Lee's book on the sun and it's interesting where we see very little starvation in hunter-gatherer groups. They will eat the preferential foods, the foods that they like the best in an ever-increasing radius from where their base camp is. Even though there are other foods that are very convenient nearby but they value both the flavor and then potentially the nutritional value less. But if all of those foods are gone and they fall back on starvation foods, they have lots of options right at hand which are convenient but they will go out of their way spending even more calories to go seek out things that are more novel. Okay, thank you. Yeah, great question. Please. I'm gonna add something we can avoid. That was not working, sorry. Totally throwing out the baby with the bath water. There is a major factor in macronutrient type in a behavioral context. In other words, most foods are under the control of deprivation before hungry will eat. Sugary foods tend to be what are known as generalized reinforcers. We'll eat even if we just finished eating which is a major reason why we serve dessert after we're finished eating. Right. So I think that's a factor as well. Absolutely. Yes, sir. Rob, in your books you talk about meat, fish, fowl and eggs and you mentioned an emphasis on lean cut meats. But in the paleo world and more specifically ketogenic, we talk about higher fat. So is there a reason why you refer specifically to lean cut meats as opposed to like if I've got options in front of me, I'm gonna take the fattier cut because it's tasty and I'm telling myself it's healthier. Is lean cut healthier? Not necessarily, but it was one. So there's two things in that first book that I did that I wouldn't say sleight of hand, but it, so there's all this controversy everywhere over different things like cholesterol levels, for example. So I suggested lean cut meats because then the folks who are in that more mainstream paradigm were like, okay, he said lean meats, even though when you get to the recipe section, it's not lean meats at all. And then there was the cholesterol suggestion which was totally in line on the front part with what the kind of mainstream recommendations are, but then I had the caveat.  So I ended up, and it's funny because I didn't get any pushback because when they read through the whole thing, typically they see the thing that they want to see and then they don't get excited about the other part that they disagree with, they just kind of focus on the first part. So there was actually a bit of subterfuge on that, trying to cater to both of those camps because I had heard these things pop up all the time. Yeah, yeah, so good digging that up, yeah.


Well, good afternoon everyone. I hopefully had a great day today. My name is Bill Hanckert. I'm an IT architect at IBM and this is Chino. Hey, Dewin. Thanks for attending. Chino Sahu also an architect and Bill will kind of take you through some context of what we do in IBM before we kind of jump into the meat of the presentation. So hopefully I'm going to keep you guys awake. You know, I know it's been a long day and it's 5.30 and we've got stuck with the end session, but let's try to keep it a little bit interesting. I'm going to kind of go through the slides a little quickly and then we have some Q&A. You have questions and we'll get through it. So I'm going to walk out this way just because I can't really click and point or, you know, but so what's this thing working here? No, it isn't working. Sorry about that. Oh, here we go. So what we'd like to get out of this session here is obviously understand why we have a use case for centralized image management within OpenStack. What drove us to this? A little bit of an overview of the IBM Hybrid Development Cloud. This is a hybrid development cloud team within IBM. This is not internet-facing. This isn't software. We're an internal team within cloud that supports the various development and support teams and test teams within IBM. We provide services to them. And some of the technologies that we've used to develop this tool chain, Jenkins, Packer, IBM Endpoint Manager for Security, and obviously Microsoft KMS that we use for auto registration of our Windows images. So a little bit of a context here of the mission. We started in 2015 for all the IBM development teams within the cloud analytics security teams that needed to leverage OpenStack as we're a fairly large VMware environment and OpenStack is coming along. We wanted to provide a method to have continuous delivery, have them unbounded, give them that OpenStack. Here's your project. Here's your images. Here's your flavors. Here's your network. Go forward and deliver. And we wanted to step out of the way. We didn't want to inhibit them. So as OpenStack is growing in leaps and bounds within the company, we wanted this project and we wanted to basically have something to deliver to them and sort of step out of the way, have something common, have something that would be global. We have four locations that we're in today. Littleton, Mass, RTP, Carolina, Hursley, England, and Toronto, Canada. So we have global teams. The need for commonality across all these teams was paramount because a developer could be working on projects in multiple locations. Just to add real quick, I mean, two fundamental business objectives. We wanted to ensure our user-based development teams that build software, build services. We want to make sure they're enabled to do their development in a hybrid context, do their dev tests on-prem, and then have the ability to promote that workload or promote that offering out into our public cloud. And then also enable them with the tools and self-service capabilities to do continuous delivery. Deliver more frequently, deliver in an automated way, adopt more of the dev-op practices that we're trying to champion within our company and really across the industry. Thanks, Jim. So I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of our cloud here, and I'm going to use the laser pointer to kind of point out some of the things here. So obviously we have our OpenStack dashboard, and for those of you that are on my way here, I'm sorry. So here's our dashboard. We use Jenkins. We use stack like Rafaana over here, basically our login page. And one of the things that we did with our users was this lobby project. And so we created a project with an OpenStack and all the clouds. And we told users they had sort of a try and buy, go in there, kick the tires. Do you like it? Is it going to work for you? As they adopted it, then we engage them and we create projects and then start onboarding them to our environment. And we use Slack. Right here we have GitHub. We have a product called BluePay. That's a custom application with an IBM that we charge our clients for that come in to leverage our cloud resources. You can kind of think of it as OpenStack plus as a service. We used OpenStack as the base and then built a lot of functionality around and on top of it. Automating a lot of our business processes that are specific to corporate tools, corporate processes. And today we're going to actually focus on the image piece of this, the image customization and the image replication and kind of syncing that across all of our clouds. So just a little bit of an overview of our environment is here. And the right-hand side would be within the IBM intranet. And obviously we're using GitHub. We have obviously OpenStack. We have it in these four different locations. We use SpectrumScale which is GPFS for storage, Cinder, Nova and Glance. Obviously OpenSwitch, VSwitch for networking. Stack like Rafaana, Kibana and Nagios monitoring the network, monitoring the OpenStack infrastructure, getting alerts when certain services within OpenStack aren't responding. Good little tool. Right here is our security tool within IBM that we have to ensure that our images when they're on the IBM intranet are compliant. They're patched. They have the appropriate antiviruses. They have the appropriate password policies and they meet our business guidelines. This is our ticketing system. We use that for support. IBM CloudDesk is basically a user has a problem. They submit a ticket pretty much similar to other ticketing systems. Blue pages and blue groups. This is our LDAP authentication. We've wired in the previous screen. I can show you right here. We basically wire all that in. That's my IBM intranet ID into our corporate blue pages directory. We don't have to use any on-prem LDAP. We don't have to use any active directory. We have everything within the corporate directory that we can use. It's a lot easier for users. Also, it's a lot easier for us with these blue groups because we do use blue groups, LDAP groups to lock down and segregate projects from each other and give people access within the open stack infrastructure. As I showed you previously, BluePay, which is a usage and charge back tool that we use. Right over here. Basically, we have the interconnects into our software labs. We have dedicated links from each one of the labs and locations that don't traverse the IBM intranet. Typically, the IBM intranet is in each location. They go through a blue code proxy somewhere out to the internet. These are directly into the pods within software. We use these high-speed file transfers to move data from the labs within software that folks have content or images or operating open stack environments, operating system. Anything could be out there that they need to move data from their continuous delivery model. Let's see right here. Our Cloud Registry, BlueBox, and let's see, I can't really see that. Yeah, IT SAS, the same thing here. That's really an overview of our environment. Pretty large, a little complex, but that's the lay of the land. Like I said, we're focusing mainly on the image repo that we're going to talk about a little bit more, but I just want to give you a bit of an overview of how we're using open stack within our environment. All right, so the problem here is images, obviously, are what our users are going to use. As we see the patches, everybody loves the patch, and OS gets non-compliant, and things happen out there. VMs send out there, people don't patch, don't put AP viruses, problems happen, and then we have sometimes issues. So as you see, when it first started out, we have a nice pretty house, and then we have the arcade house and an old micro bus sitting next to it, which isn't good. So we needed to basically address this issue. I mean, I'm as guilty as the next is I was creating my own images and my location, I was promoting them to my cloud, Chino's doing the same, and we all kind of gathered together to say, listen, we shouldn't be doing this, we should have a central team doing this, we should basically coordinate this and have one central team managing, coordinating it where we can save time, reduce duplication of effort. Yeah, I mean, I think the message here is you've got to take care of your images, you've got to take care of your instances. We don't want people to do it, so let's build a tool or build automation, and then take care of the automation, instead of having to take care of the images themselves. Okay. Thanks, Jim. And so the case for change, as I said, eliminate the duplication of effort, improve how we deliver the images, avoid the images getting out of date, out of patching, and obviously provide that consistent user experience across all clouds. Like I said, we're in four locations. We want to ensure if a developer that logs in to Hursley England has an Ubuntu 14.04 image is using it, is the same user experience as they log into the RTP cloud. So we try to keep that level of consistency the same across all the clouds. Okay, and as you see right here, we have a pretty, you know, this is just a snippet of all the different permutations of what we have, I'm sorry, a snippet of the permutations of all the different operating systems, and potentially what packages people may want on them. And we'll talk about that a little bit in the next few slides. I mean, our users are not different than most users. They're going to want a base OS image plus something else. And so instead of having them just import their own image into their project, we want them to kind of follow the standard process that will end up spitting out an image that will be compliant out of the box, will have what they need, and will be maintained over the long term by the automation that we have in place. But you'll see that this slide really illustrates the problem. There's just so many different combinations that it's a scale problem, and we want to standardize that approach. OK, thanks, Jim. So here we are at a high level. The solution that, and luckily today, we have one of our developers here that has helped develop this product, which is really neat. So really, I'm going to stand over this way and kind of go over at a high level right here of, whoops, sorry, I keep it in the wrong button. So really what it is is we want to publish a compliant OS every 30 days to an image catalog. That image synchronization gets detected. We do an image sync to the different clouds and the different locations. And then if a customer has a requirement to say, hey, I want Java, I want DB2, I want Nginx, they basically make that request, and that will basically trigger the synchronization, and then the image customization will happen automatically. So the image repository right here is available throughout the IBM intranet. Folks can sync to that. There's a global storage area where they can pull those different images, and it's a cron task that runs every night to pull this data down. So here is the manufacturing, starting the manufacturing process of the base image. And I can go over here. So basically we start with an ISO, like an Ubuntu ISO. We bring it in, and then we load it into Glance. And then the sync to create, we do a nova boot. We create the VM. So we create the VM and create a volume with that. And then that gets published into Glance. So once that's in the Glance repository, then, as you see right here, here's the VM right there. And there's the Glance image repository right there. The Jenkins job gets kicked off right here. And basically we do a Jenkins job that talks to the master, and so for example, in this case, we're going to probably be building Ubuntu. And so the job starts off. It does a clone of the image. It starts Packer, which is the OpenStack Builder orchestration tool. And then we start these different steps through there as we walk through the manufacturing of each one of these pieces. And some of these processes are optional, but some can be run, and then we run a test. We then copy the metadata. Now this right here, the IT SAS registration in a scan. This is our security tool, where we need to register our images within our security tool. We need to also scan it for any vulnerabilities open ports. And then essentially what happens in our IT SAS pool is a floating operating system record gets created. And the security system now says that this is a valid image, it's compliant. The end user that eventually gets this image will be compliant from day one once they get it. So then once that is complete, if there's a failure, obviously we get notification. We use Slack. The Build team will get notification of that. It is then published up to GSA. So GSA is our IBM Global Storage Architecture. It is based on GPFS. It's a clustered file system. It's available all around the world. This is where the Cron job pulls to the different locations among IBM. So I'm going to just stop right there. Right here is kind of a busy chart. Questions right now? I mean, I'll take some questions. Yes? Yes, we can do the state check. Yes, that is, yes. Steve, if you could feel the question. Yeah, that's right. We start with the basic. So it's a bare operating system. Yeah, OK. Any other questions? OK. I know it's a bit of an eye chart here, but trying to break down the methodology that we used here. So the image customization. And this is the point where if an image was published and the end user wanted, say, some different package on it, we could trigger another job that would install Java. And then it would be to their project. They would get that delivered to their project. They would have a customized image for their usage. And once again, as you see through here, it goes through and the job runs the plug-in packer, the notification through Slack, and then it puts in some of these job params here. The user actually defines what they want in their image in a GitHub repo that we share. They define what they want on the image, and then that gets pushed as the inputs through the Jenkins job to build the image and then push out to the cloud. Question? That is correct, yes. Yeah, there's a customization job that can run if they want to separate. Because on the onset, we didn't want to hit every premium. We wanted to provide a base image, and then it's up to the developer what he or she wants. But then we knew there was the need for, of course, it's not going to just be straight up onto. They're going to want other things. So we have that ability for them to do that. It's all user-initiated, the user-initiated. Yeah, it's all user-initiated. They go through and define what they want in Jenkins. Jenkins automates that process. And 20, 30 minutes later, they have that image in their OpenStack tenant. Think of another question? Oh, I'm sorry.  Go ahead. Sorry. Sorry. Yes? You mean for updates? If you assign a floating IP? Well, I mean it can not outbound, right? So if it's in there, it can pull updates to the base. So if the user, so the thinking was to keep it. So for 30 days, it's compliant. That's our policy. And then after 31 days, if there were patches, they do have the ability to pull patches out. You know? Yes? Yeah. If you want the latest version of whatever software customized on your image, you'll have to go through and recreate the image, you know? OK. Wait. Sorry. Still working? Yeah. So a couple of slides back, you had a security scan somewhere? Yeah, right over here. Yeah. So when the customers come in and they modify the image to add whatever they want, do you go back into that flow and rerun the scan on that custom image? Yes, yes. So if they obviously have to install Apache or if they install some down level version of something or whatever, which we don't want them, you know, which we ensure they don't do, then the scan would pick that up. So I mean, if they're going to, regardless of, once they have that software installed on their image and they're out there in testing, after a certain cycle, there's a scan that our security system has to do at a certain point in time on that instance to ensure that they're compliant. Well, we do. Yes, no, we do. We ensure that what they get is a compliant image and the record that's in our security system indicates that at the date of manufacture, this image has been made compliant, moving forward once it goes into the, you know, when they run it with a Nova. So it's always compliant while it's out there. When they provision, they know that they're getting an image that is fully compliant to our security specifications. Sorry, there was a gentleman right there, I had a question. Is it 30 days, Steve? The version of how the time period we keep the image? Yeah, every 30 days. Well, we'll update it. We'll update it.  You know, it's a function of how many images. Your management cost is going to be a function of a number of images. So we try to minimize that amount while still maximizing what users need. Question? Yeah, the previous slide, where you start with the ISO? Yes. A little... Is that a typo? Is that a type? Is it manual? Yeah, all right. I'm extrapting, man. Yeah. But it's only done once. Yeah. So as you see right here, it's the major OS release is done once, and then upon that, once that's in the repository, it's patched upon that. So we don't have to do that again. So, I mean, if 1704 comes out, they're going to do that manual process once more. But then when 1704.1... One time per major OS... Yes, yes. Any more questions? I'll just crank along here. I think I stood here. All right, and so here's a little scene behind Packer, the JSON. And as you see, kind of the YAML file that is used to create the user. I mean, create the different components. We have the type, what it is. OpenStack, the different regions, the availability zones, and we go down the list of the networking, the floating IP. So this is what gets, excuse me, baked into the image as it gets created. And just another look behind the scenes on the Jenkins job that will get kicked off to run Packer. And then notification, once again, using Slack notification, if the job failed, it succeeded, we go into Slack to ensure that the functionality is there. So the next slide here is that we had a bit of a, in the previous slides, we had some IBM Endpoint Manager. And this is a, if you heard of BigFix, this is a IBM security tool, that we have optionally the end user can install on their image that the IBM Endpoint Manager can go out and maintain patching, compliance, a fairly large portfolio of software to do a lot of this work, but it's used in IBM against a lot of our images, does a lot of stuff behind the scenes to keep the images that are long-lived. And we'd only use this on a long-lived floating IP addressed instance that's running out there. And it handles more than just OS patching. It'll handle any sort of middleware or software that would require patching it. It doesn't have 100% coverage, but it's pretty close. And it's really key to keeping instance-level compliance ongoing for those rare cases where there are long-living, long-running VMs. We tend to try to drive users to minimize the number of long-running VMs. OpenStack is all about dynamic workload and provisioning when you need to and destroying as you're done. Question? So it's within our security tool. The end user has the ability, if they deem, they want to have this function run against their machine. If they just wanna set it and forget it, then that will go off and do the patch management. It doesn't, I mean, the change control part of that. Well, that's what IT SaaS is for. That's what the security tool IT SaaS will basically make a notation that on this day, IBM Endpoint Manager applied these patches on this. So if we're in case of an audit, we have basically the record of history of how this instance was patched. So that change would happen on the endpoint, when the IBM Endpoint Manager happens. Right. Right. So for these, we call these, so we classify things a little bit, our security classification. So these would be considered test and development machines where the change management rigor is not as a production-facing machine. I mean, if it's like a critical patch, they'll get nag notes and eventually get escalated. I mean, I'll go to their manager, the manager's manager up through, I mean, it's, we have a tool that does the change management that every image and instance is linked to. So any patch that needs to be applied, if it's a, you know, sub one critical patch and it doesn't get patched, it'll eventually get escalated to their management. And let's see what else has been right. So obviously our Windows machines, once they are our Windows instances, I might say, they are managed by a KMS server. They come online. They automatically hit the KMS server to register as people know with Windows doing unattended syspreps and all that stuff can get kind of gnarly. This kind of handles some of the key management for us, which is pretty good. I mean, I think it helps a lot of the folks that are using Windows to register these things. And, you know, it's, as you see the numbers there, one KMS, about 150,000 instances where you basically were churning and burning instances, Windows when we're doing tests, so we need to re-register. And so the outcome here, so we have common compliant images across the clouds. You know, no compliance cost for 30 days. So you got a 30 day get out of jail free card. And after that, if they continue to keep the image, then they'll have to maintain it within our security tool to have to patch it. We integrate with our compliance system, which is key because we can't have machines that are not patched, unsecure, running on our network. As you see, we have an automated framework to customize the specific stacks. And the user experience from the image perspective is the same across all geographies. So we have the same look and feel. And the reduced cost associated with that is, you know, on average, we're saving around 16 hours, man hours per week across each location. So we don't have everybody doing it. We have a team that is central that handles all of those for all the different geos. And that duplication of effort that we've had of different sites. So we have to free up the local IT teams to do other things and support our other functions within the team. And here's some numbers here about BigFix, some of the different locations that they're in within the IBM Corporation, and some of the patches and what they are doing across the different geos. So fairly robust environment there. And, questions? Yes. Yes. It's via a requirement. It's a Jenkins job that gets through. They log in to Jenkins. The UI that we have in Jenkins for them. Yep. Right. It's a different menu as opposed to, yep. Other questions? It's post-process that happens. So when the machine is actually built, it has knowledge of the KMS server and it knows where to register to. Pardon, I'm sorry. That was through, I believe, the Sysprep preparation. When the image, yeah, and the boot. Yeah, it's in the bootstrap process. Other questions? Yes. No, they're always registered within the, our security system. So because, right, because we actually have jobs. So we have a listener that listens within the framework of OpenStack that sees something. There's a message queue. That basically says, oh, there's a new Windows instance. I'm gonna register it. It has the Fossee record associated with it. It belongs to this person. It's in there. And so each user within the development teams has their own login to the security portal. So it would show up on their list as, okay, now you have a new image within the security portal. I mean, compliance is just about, it's not just about being safe and secure. There's a lot of emphasis on audits, making sure everything's documented. Is there anything that touches the network? We're required to captures, that this VM by this person with these characteristics and this OS touch the network, mostly for audit reasons. It's less about being secure, to be honest. Plus, I mean, we wanna ensure that we're not gonna have any malicious activity on the network. Yeah. You know, obviously it goes into the product. So we wanna make sure that there's no bad things going on. Yes. Yes. We don't send our images out there. They're only within the blue network. They're not out to software. So within software it's, they have their own methodology of provisioning. So software, if you ordered a server, a Red Hat server, they would provision it for you. They have their own provisioning system. So yeah, and I mean, if you would deploy, so if you would just get bare metal and install OpenStack, then it would be a different story. We could use our own process out there. But if we just ordered bare metal, or if we ordered like a Windows sent us, a realm machine out there, they have automatically, they'll provision it for you. They have their own satellite servers. They have their own yes servers. They have their own kickstart servers for all that stuff. Today it's separate, but we've got a work item to try to either host soft-layered images, public cloud images within our on-prem cloud so then they can literally port them over. But today it's a recreate the workload in public cloud. But we don't really have a good portability, workload portability, whether it's VMs or containers. We don't really have a good portability method from on-prem to public cloud. It's more about enabling the connectivity between the two. Any more questions? Well, I thank you for your time. I hope you enjoy your event tonight. And thanks for taking the time to talk. Listen to us.


15 hot English words and expressions from EspressoEnglish.net 1. Hotline A hotline is a telephone line that gives quick and direct access to helper information. For example, the police might have a domestic abuse hotline that people can call if they are being hurt in their homes by family members. A city might have a tourism hotline that tourists can call to get information. 2. Hotbed A hotbed is a place that provides especially good conditions for something to grow or develop. The thing that develops can be bad or good. For example, a department in the government can be a hotbed of corruption, or an area like Silicon Valley in California can be a hotbed of innovation. 3. Hotshot The word hotshot describes a person who is very skilled and successful and often implies that this person is very confident and maybe a bit arrogant showing off their success. For example, my friend's father is a hotshot lawyer who has worked on some of the most famous cases in the country. 4. Hotheaded A person who is hotheaded is easily angered. They are quick to lose their temper. I once had a hotheaded client who would yell at me for making a mistake. 5. Selling like hotcakes If a product is selling like hotcakes, it means a lot of people are buying the product very fast. For example, a popular singer's new CD will be selling like hotcakes as soon as it is released. 6. A hotspot This expression has two meanings. It can refer to a region where there is a lot of active conflict and violence. For example, if two countries were fighting about some territory on their border and attacking each other, that area would be a hotspot. Hotspot can also refer to a place that is lively. It has a lot of activity and popular, like a nightclub or busy tourist place. 7. A hotspot Again, a hot button issue. A hot button issue is a controversial topic that people often have strong opinions about, so it can make people get passionate, emotional, or even angry when discussing it. Things like abortion and immigration tend to be hot button issues. 8. Hot off the press This expression refers to a publication, a book, magazine, newspaper, etc. that has been printed and released very recently. 9.  They are saying things that are ridiculous and shouldn't be taken seriously. For example, marketers are full of hot air. They make all these promises and then things are never as good as they claim. 10. Hot under the collar If you are hot under the collar, it means you are angry. This expression refers to the fact that when you get angry, you can often feel your body temperature rising. 11. In hot water To be in hot water means to be in trouble, especially in a situation where you will be punished or someone will be mad at you.  12. Have the hots for someone This expression is an informal way to say romantically or sexually attracted to someone. For example, my sister has the hots for a guy in her writing class. She can't stop thinking about him. 13. Hot to trot If someone is hot to trot, it means they are ready, willing, eager and enthusiastic to start something or to go ahead. Let's say your company proposes a partnership with a non-profit organization. If the organization seems very excited about it and wants to move forward right away, then they are hot to trot. 14. Hot on someone's heels In a race or competition, being hot on someone's heels means to be immediately behind them in close pursuit. For example, the second place runner can be hot on the heels of the runner in the lead, or a company that is leading the market by a small margin might have a competitor that is hot on its heels. 15. Strike while the iron is hot This expression means you should take advantage of especially good conditions to take some action now. For example, if you want to buy a house and there is a sudden drop in house prices, you should strike while the iron is hot and buy a house now while the prices are low. If you'd like to learn more idiomatic expressions which are common in spoken English, take the English Idioms course at espressoenglish.net. This course will help you discover 260 common idioms that native speakers use, and there are plenty of quizzes and practice exercises to help you remember the expressions. Visit espressoenglish.net, click on courses, and look for the English Idioms course.