Okay, thanks, Adam, in the studio. John Furrier, Dave Vellante, back on the Cube set here in the middle of all the action of Mobile World Congress is Cloud City, Telco DR, it's a digital revolution. Michael Sparanza, CEO of ZephyrTelz here with us. Great to see you, thanks for coming on the Cube here. Great, welcome. Thanks for having me, Dave and John, appreciate it. All right, so we're in the middle of the actor. We're just talking while we're waiting to come on camera. East Coast, I'm from California, Dave's in Boston, you're from the New York area. We're back to real life. This is what's happening here. It's a hybrid event, so not fully packed, good showing, a lot of action, so let's get to it. What do you guys do? Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and I got some specific public cloud questions for you. Excellent, so ZephyrTelz is a global provider of telecommunication solutions to everyone across the stack, tier one, tier two, and tier three CSPs throughout the world. We've got 300 customers, and I think probably the most interesting part about us as a company is that we actually probably started our lineage in the traditional sense in terms of these on-premise legacy large systems, and we are a provider that has jumped in feet first to the cloud revolution, and we're taking the effort now and the investment to move all of our solutions to the public cloud, and we're super excited to be here and showcase that to everybody. I got to ask you because one of the things that we've been documenting, Dave and I, for the past 10 years is the enterprise transformation. I mean, the digital transformation has been going on for quite some time on the enterprise side. Telco now seems like it's getting tuned up nicely to be disrupted and transformed. You're in the middle of it. You've been on both sides of the table. Now you're on the full throttle transformation. What's your take? Where are we at? Yeah, it feels as though we're at an inflection point. I think the last call of 12 or 18 months, maybe that's been an industry pause where we kind of look back and reflect around what their long-term strategies are, and more and more, just over the last 12 or 18 months, you've seen more announcements, more big names, jump in feet first, be a little bit more public, no pun intended about what their intentions are, what their investments that they're making into the efforts that they're trying to deploy in their networks. And we feel like we're at an inflection point and we're ready for it. It's interesting that Zephyr-Tel had a legacy business, on-prem business in your transitioning. What was the catalyst for that transition and what has it taken to get that journey looked like? Yeah, I think the catalyst is really figuring out how to enable our customers to compete on a ladder that has more rungs to it. If you look at these legacy on-premise solutions, we could pour mountains and mountains of dollars into R&D, and at the end of the day, we would still be struggling to offer them something that really creates a true competitive disadvantage or a competitive advantage for their business. And really, when you make the move to the public cloud and you start leveraging some of the platforms that are out there, it changes your profile dynamically in terms of what you could offer to the customer. So for us, that realization is what happened and we jumped in feet first and just the ability to get products to market, to give them a different cost structure is something that we would have never been able to do with our traditional legacy approach. So how did you do it? Because you have Balancing Act there, you got your existing business, did you sort of fence that off and sort of start with the cloud native approach and what did you find was the sort of before and after and some of the benefits that you saw? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's a difficult conversation with the customer, right? I think you have to go and engage the customer and be our approach has been to be very open and transparent with them. We're not telling them that what they're using is doesn't have a future. We're just telling them that we believe the future is brighter somewhere else and that's what we're choosing to invest in. And they shouldn't even know it. I mean, because the Club of Cloud is bringing in new things. One of the things we've been riffing on the past year is the three Rs. Reset, reboot, days one, you got to reboot things. Then you replatform with the cloud and then all the winners, once they replatform to the cloud, they refactored their operations. And so this seems to be like the secret recipe. Once you get to the refactoring, then you're introducing net new opportunities. So you do some cost recovery, you replatform, you get some things going and then boom, new things are happening. Yes, absolutely. And you have to have a long-term horizon. You can't, if you're trying to make these types of transitions over quarters or even years, it's not something that's easy to do with the business. Did you move the whole house into the cloud? We're working on it. Okay, so when you think about the telco industry, to me anyway, there's some clear workloads that can and should go into the cloud immediately. I think about mainframe downsizing in the day.  And so is it a similar parallel here? Yes, we've actually got maybe 10 products in the portfolio. We probably have half of them in the public cloud already. It doesn't mean every customer is using them in that dimension, but we have half of them already in the public cloud. As an option. Yeah, absolutely as an option. And then the others, it's really, I think, understand of this paradigm of kind of, when we get into more detail, I got this no feature left behind mindset that you have to challenge where you really have to convince the customer that no industry disruption ever started by making the new innovative product to everything the old one did, right? And they have to kind of take that journey with you and lean into the change and understand what the long-term benefit is. And talk about those, the business, I mean, you remember, John, when we got started, John was driving to the data center and you know, rack and cabling. And then when we went to the public cloud, we were like, wow, we saw the light. So until you do it, sometimes you can't experience it. What are they seeing in terms of the benefits? Yeah, I mean, the two major benefits are obviously costs and agility, right? And you know, you talk about agility and just what it enables them to do from a subscriber experience perspective, deploying new services, adapting those services to the new business paradigms and really improving the customer experience, right? There's no mistake, you look at this industry, it's probably got one of the most depressing statistics around customer experience in NPS of any industry in the world, right? So, cables up there too. Yes, it's hard not to improve that. And the other is costs, right? And that's an undeniable discussion that you can have if you get to the right level in the customer about what the long-term benefits of the cloud are. You know, it's funny, you usually hear NPS in the context of how great the NPS is, but you hear it a lot in this industry in a different context. Yes, yes. Well, one of the things we've been talking about is the big theme we're going to get to tomorrow, the next day, the open side of this. Open, Ransom and Rayleigh Hopp, O-Ran Alliances. Got more and more members, we're reporting on that. As you look at the stack, the tech stack, you got a lot of OT and IT's coming in with, because it's digital, a lot more IP-based systems. So you have this OT legacy culture of just, okay, we have, sometimes regulation drives it, but sometimes it's just old ways of doing things. Is that going to be encapsulated with, like, say containers or does it have to die? Does it have to be let go or can you nurture it? Like, sometimes we still have mainframes. Big banks have mainframes, you don't go away, they do one thing. So is there a coexistence between that old legacy and on top of it abstracting away that nonsense? I think certainly there can be, and we've employed that approach with customers where if they're looking at deploying new services or tackling a new emerging market or rolling out a new tiered service offering that might be under a different brand or label from their core brand, we've certainly approached it that way. The big thing for us is really approaching that discussion with the customer and really talking about what we can do, not what we can do and can't emphasize that enough. And the other piece is really having the right decision makers in the conversation, right? And understand that you're talking to someone who understands the impact on the PNL, not just on the making kind of virtuous technical decisions about the way things are done in the past. Michael, I got to get your thoughts on the agile because obviously cloud, speed, agility, we just heard from Microsoft on the interview I did with him around high density chips and low power that's going to enable more stuff. So there's more stuff coming in the hyperscale with more cloud and you start to see it comes like snowflake built on top of AWS, hugely successful. So this is an enablement market. Agility is key. How, as the CEO, you're looking at this, okay, you're refactoring, you're replatforming. Agility is a benefit. How does that change how you run the business, how you serve customers? Yeah, so it really changes where our investment dollars go. That's probably the number one impact. So if you look at AWS as a platform, it started 15 years ago and had one service. Today it's got over 200. So understanding that these platforms receive billions and billions of dollars of investment every single year, regardless of which one you're aligned to and leveraging that to power the services that we provide, we don't have to build everything. We can leverage the capability that they provide to us, really focus our energy and our dollars in the things that make our application unique to our customer. So that was really one major tradition as leading an organization that you have to make. And then you have to convince the organization to go in that direction. It's different and you have to be very over and transparent with the customer. Well, the early days of financial service, cloud was an evil word and now every financial service organizations are leaning in big time. There's obviously reticence among public telcos and move to the public cloud. There's a lot of discussion about, oh, openness, it's hard to replicate the reliability of the network, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe some of that, you know, rational and founded, but what do you see in terms of the reticence and the risks and how are you helping mitigate those? Yes, my perspective has really just been this kind of cascade of excuses and explanations as to why not to go, right? And it started with, you know, things that could have been legitimate issues at the time of data sovereignty or security. They've been solved, right? You move on and now it's, you know, that notion of no feature or no man left behind. We have to have feature parity, we can't go. We've, you know, every other industry has debunked that myth. And now the one that I think is most important to challenge is this organizational dysfunction where it's really about accessing the right levels in the customer to have that conversation, to neutralize the power or importance of any one dimension of decision making and have an overt business discussion about what are the numbers behind the solution and how you're providing it. You have to include the cost discussion in it and you have to actually get the finance person to really understand the technology and not just outsource that decision to somebody else. Because that person is often faced with making a decision that, you know, could be delatorious to their role, their business, their own organizations and that's something that needs to be arbitrated at a senior level. I think that, we've seen this before.  And that's what we saw in the financial services business and then the forget it. It's just all the parts. Well, the thing too though with the skill set is not only is there a skill retraining going on, new roles are emerging. So for instance, the SREs we've been covering in a lot of these big companies, you got Site Reliability Engine, a pioneer by Google, that's a new role dealing with infrastructure. And as infrastructure as code comes out, it gets more fuzzy with some of the hood because now you got Lambda, you got Serverless. So that entire programmability is going to put pressure on these old OT stacks. What's your forecast on that? And that's what broke the barrier in a lot of these regulated industries was infrastructure code. All the developers, to your point, wanted in. And that was like the penguins off the iceberg. But does that push the pressure on the OT stacks or does the abstraction at the top drive the innovation? Is it going to be disrupted down here or is it going to be at the top of the stack? What's your take? Yeah, so I think, you know, I've seen that transition in financial services. I actually had a front of a seat in financial services with a different role. And the way I saw it actually unfold was having some sort of role that sits between the CFO and the CTO. Someone who's responsible for the, not only the technical evolution of the architecture but the financial evolution of the architecture that can actually be a compatriot to the CFO making those decisions. So that's how I've seen it really transition. Unless there's buy-in from the top down, it will just be kind of pressure from the bottom up and we'll never see a take hold. If bottom up, bottom up will not work unless top down. So it's got to be top down, bottom up, as you were saying. I mean, what drives that? Does the legal come in and drive that a little bit now because you've got a lot of pressure with cyber? So you've got cyber, you've got regulatory pressure with telcos, I mean, some of these carriers, they get penalized. Or are they still blockers? Is that the legal still a blocking? Yeah, we haven't seen legal really enter the decision-making process for us. And for us, we probably wouldn't involve them unless we needed to. Quite honestly, I think it could be more of a blocker than someone, you know, they can always say no, they can't really say yes, is our view of that. So they're an important person to be on the journey, but probably not someone that we would seek to include in the decision. All right, Michael, I want you to take the last minute to just take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. What's your vision of the company? Obviously, you're on the right wave, the wave's big. You get your surfboards out there, you're going to ride the wave. What are you going to do? What's the big goals? What's your plans? Take them in to put a plug into what you're doing. Yeah, so look, we see the future as a marketplace of cloud-based solutions. We feel that we're someone that's trying to lead that innovation. I think it's fantastic to see what's happening here right now with Cloud City and giving all the disruptive vendors a voice in the industry that they probably did not have before. And we really see the vision as that open marketplace where things are leveraging APIs. All these systems can communicate across the stack and we're going to be part of that journey. We're showcasing solutions here today around subscriber management to drive our pool. We've got solutions for managing the customer experience in the home that will increase retention. And really, everybody has to just open their minds to learn about what's possible with the public cloud and then translate it to how it can actually benefit their business. Are you guys looking to hire anything you want to share? Plug for what? Yeah, look, we're growing. We've got solutions here that we're looking to position the customers across the stack globally. It's here one, tier two, it's end tier three. And please come by the booth and visit us and learn about us as a company. No, John, the big difference between the cloud this decade and the cloud last decade is such an ecosystem now that's built in, it's forming that you can leverage, right? That was kind of really immature last decade and it's not just one company going after this. It is the ecosystem. Well, the problem, the opportunity is is that the telcos are going to get punched in the face with the edge now driving the 5G because now they cannot ignore the fact that you now have a cloud edge that is explosive in functionality, low cost, silicon, high density, it's just a game changer. That consumer technology's coming to the edge and it's going to forcing function. So if they blink, who blinks first? Telcos or cloud? So public cloud's coming like a freight train. Clothes are blinking. It ain't blinking, it's a freight train. The freight train of public cloud is coming into the telco and if people don't adapt to it, they're going to be toast and I think the opportunity is for entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs to drive that innovation. Okay, innovation's here and we're going to continue bringing the coverage and we're going to go right to the studio where Adam and the team are there.


Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of the Private Property Home Shopper Show. Again, we are in bed for view this time visiting a mansion that is 10,450,000 rent, boasts four rooms, four and a half bathrooms and a six car garage. I'm standing in the entryway over this incredible form style manner. We're going to be taking a look. My name is Chad, this is Home Shopper Show. Welcome home. In walking around this mansion, it is an incredible moment. A moment of experience because no expense was spared and you can see that through the finishes. Essentially everywhere, just above me in this walkway we've got this stunning outdoor chandelier beautifully sealed flagstones. Just pave the way all the way up this wrap around outside balcony or should I say veranda. This bit being covered you can see space for a pool table but this pool table rests on another small design detail that I think is incredible and that's that mosaic floor. All of the bedrooms have access to this outdoor veranda. It feels like there's a lot of indoor outdoor living here but all of it is sealed off to the elements which I really like. You can see just how much the dogs at least enjoy this outdoor area. Dining room table there, that's how spacious this veranda is. Coming back off into the sunshine, let's talk about this garden. Spacious front garden built in trampoline. You've also got a jacuzzi massive pool and right over there is that six car garage passing back underneath this chandelier. We've got another sun spot here, two lounges, beautiful little areas. Just sit back and take in how incredibly well designed this house has been but when we're talking about design let's head off down these stairs. We find ourselves in another enclosed area this time with string lights built in illuminating this incredibly large outdoor dining room table. You're placed right here by your pool. You can really enjoy the outdoors. Then you've got another chandelier being the feature of this outdoor area but now it's time to head indoors and we're going to start right off in the corner of the house. We've swapped flagstones to these beautiful checkered tile flooring. So here it is, the bar area. So a couple of key features here is obviously you've got this inbuilt bar, beautiful wood. Now the wood theme continues throughout the house. Got these dangling chandeliers and this time made out of buckets really giving that feel of a vintage bar. All of the games in here obviously a really cool design element. You can design this bar however you'd like. It's got that much space and it's got such tall ceilings that it really does feel like a spacious area. Then we come to this fireplace. You'll see more of these throughout the house. A slab of reclaimed wood matching these pieces of exposed concrete. And last but not least when we talk about things you're going to see throughout the house is this ceiling right over here. Got this lattice farm style ceiling but what makes it's different is in each and every single one of the 45 degree lattice things you've got inbuilt lighting. So you can imagine how incredible that looks at night. And then when you're done looking at the ceiling you've got this stunning privacy shades right here that you can pull across and seal your bar area away from your living area. And that's where we are right now. One of the many living areas you can find in this home. Massive TV screen behind me. Don't let that distract you from the design in this house. The flooring is top notch quality, oggy wood floors. You can see the quality of the wood and the grain. This isn't some stick on wood flooring. This is really incredible flooring. Two chandeliers. You've got that lattice work ceiling with all that inbuilt lighting. And then on the left hand side these double paint windows. Beautiful for installation. Opening outwards onto your back garden. Then wrapping around this way you'll see this spacious living area gives way to your dining room area. And right in the middle as I did promise is two more. A central stack of those fireplaces. I love how they've designed the exposed concrete, the reclaimed block of wood. And if we travel across this way you will see its twin sitting right over there. Central chandelier. Beautiful indoor dining room table right next to one of the most incredible kitchens I think I've ever seen. Now let's pan dramatically over to this kitchen. The oggy wood floors give way to these tiled mosaic floors where the towel really does match the colour of the cupboards. A central island of ginormous proportions with a farm style kitchen sunk right in the centre there. Take a look at this. Three chandeliers another piece of reclaimed wood hanging from those rafters. Under counter storage obviously there's so much to talk about in this kitchen so let's run through it quickly. All of the storage space right over here. Another piece of stunning wood forming your countertop which breaks away from this more formal piece of marble right over here. Then you know to bring a bit of style and a bit of warmth to it we've got this exposed brick space for a double fridge storage above it. And then we come to where the magic happens. Where you're going to be cooking up these meals and front and centre we have this right here. A vintage smeg oven really one of the most incredible ovens we've ever showcased on the home shopper show. Take a look at this. Really how incredible above it. Another smeg extractor fan you've got your built-in lighting space for your microwaves. Plug points are plenty so if you are really into appliances in your kitchen you know that that's taken care of but you might ask me to add we've seen so much here we've seen those stunning double doors leading out to an outside coffee area. Where do I keep my other appliances? Where's my washing machine? Where's my tumble dryer? Well that would be behind me. This is your scullery area let's take a look at that and then we're going to come back out here walk around this corner and see what the rest of this house has to offer. Let's go. Taking a step up onto the second unfolding of those beautiful mosaic tiles you find yourself in your scullery to your left immediately is a closable dry goods area or storage area for all of your groceries. You've got space for many under counter appliances you've got a double sink for any washing up that you might do. You also have access to your back garden as well as your space for the domestics if you do want to utilize it as that. Also one last thing that I can't fail to admit or at least point out is just all the stories that you'll find in the scullery area and how well thought out it's been designed. Now with the scullery out the way let's talk about a couple of other key features in the home. Obviously you've got so many accesses to that outdoor veranda really really nice. We've got the seating area right here taking advantage of the little bit of space but again not making the house feel crowded. Then through another stack of stackable privacy shades you find yourself in this office area. Now again beautifully equipped built-in shelving storage space that wood design that continues throughout the house. This time the lighting comes from built-in down lighting again another pair of those opening doors that lead out onto the veranda. I don't know much work you're going to be able to do with that pool table sitting right over there but if you don't want to do any work you can come right here. This is the pajama lounge because this is the wing of the house that leads off onto all of those bedrooms four bedrooms but to start off we've got to talk about the half bathroom which is right over here. Half bathroom is perfectly equipped for what it is a guest bathroom with toilet, sink, undercounter storage. Lots of space to make that bathroom feel spacious because it's going to be used if you're in this area. This here is the pajama lounge. Down lighting plenty of space for you to design it with how you'd like. Windows letting in a lot of natural lights as well including through those double doors over there and we can see some built-in cupboard space or at least a built-in TV stand right over here. This stunning wood flooring continues all the way across because what you're going to see yeah I'm going to ask my cameraman to turn around or just go all the way back you'll see just how long this hallway is and this wood flooring runs the length of it. Now I'm walking and you can see how it just carries on and carries on and carries on. It's an incredible spectacle to behold and it really shows you the length of this house and how incredibly designed it is. Off to my right is the first bedroom followed by the second, third and then the fourth being the master so let's start off over here and let's see what these bedrooms look like. Now the first bedroom you walk into might be the smallest that this house has to offer but that doesn't stop it from being incredibly equipped. Off to your left hand side you'll see some stunning built-in cupboards and then you've also got a window looking outwards onto your garden, the pool area as well as the veranda. This bedroom has a lot of space as well as down lighting so if this is a work area or if you'd like it to be another office it fits that perfectly. Now we need to talk about the en suite bathroom you've got a single vanity, toilet tucked away neatly in the corner and then a walk-in shower that has an incredibly beautiful mosaic tile flooring. First bedroom done and dusted that leaves us with the second and third before we come to the master suite that creme de la creme and here we are in the second bedroom you can see the beauty of these bedrooms just get more as we walk a little bit further on and plumb the depths of this house. This time we've got this incredible feature wall that actually looks like corrugated gold though but is flat and rather eye-catching above me again all that lighting off to the left you're built in cupboards again all of them finished stunning in hardwood love that has been done this wood flooring matches the veranda tiles that these two doors open outwards onto so every single one of these bedrooms does have access to your veranda and then off to my left and you've got every single bedroom in this home with its own en suite bathroom this one has been designed purposely for the owner of this bedroom you've got your beautiful blue cubetry and their blue flanking on your mirror your single vanity toilet and then walk and shower once again with that incredible mosaic tile finish now the third and final bedroom before we come to the master suite is almost the twin of the one we just looked at again plenty of space built in cupboards beautifully designed lighting both of these bedrooms are serviced by an air con we've got those double doors double paint glass opening outwards onto your veranda and then again you've got your en suite bathroom sliding barn door opening up onto your single vanity toilet and walk-in shower really do like how well equipped all of these bedrooms have come in and now the time has come the master suite the creme de la creme and walking into this room you are greeted with not only the scope and size of this room but this massive mantle that surrounds this fireplace i love a bedroom with a fireplace in it and i don't think you get fireplaces more grand than this one right here it's flanked by two windows leading in a lot of natural light and on the opposite end of this bedroom again you've got those sliding doors opening out onto that veranda with even more natural light the space in the room i think without question speaks for itself lighting running the length just off to my left here is your bathroom we're going to get back to that but over here you can see there's space for you to put a lounge suite a table space for you to enjoy your book relax take a look at the incredible grounds that these windows open up to but when it's time to get up when it's time to go to a meeting where you're going to be going is right through this pocket door which leads on to your walk-in closet i love a house with a walking closet and no closets come finer than this one right here with three of the four walls being flanked with cupboard space so you know no matter how many Birken bags you might buy you're always going to have a slot for them but it is now time to talk about that master bathroom en suite of course and located right over here walking into this bottom once again you're greeted with just the sense of space in this bottom stunning mosaic tiles run the length of it on my left hand side we can close this door for some privacy on the toilet we've got double vanities with double rooms and plenty of undercard storage then we've got this right over here free standing bathtub i love how the paint work matches the tiles we've got space for this ottoman right in the center so if you'd like to relax while getting dressed you know that you can and then right over here we come to this walk-in shower stunningly clad with these new york subway tiles two not one but two waterfall shower heads so if you're getting ready you know that this is the place you want to get ready in i love how this bathroom is equipped but now it's time to talk about how you could possibly become the next owner of this incredible home let's go outside straight to that pool and let's talk about who you need to speak to and how much it costs and yeah we are outside standing just above the jacuzzi and let's talk about the price point of this home four bedrooms four and a half bathrooms it comes fully solo equipped solar panels on the roof for the backup generator so it is pretty much off the grid and it comes with all those incredible features we've spoken about during the tour of this home so it is a catch at 10 450 000 and if you'd like to be the owner of this home what i'd like you to do is contact the estate agency pompa real estate michael pompa is a guy you need to speak to to schedule a viewing and possibly claim this house as your own but that does wrap up this episode of the prior property home shopper show thank you so much for tuning in every monday and friday where we air another one of south africa's most exclusive most expensive or just most incredible looking homes and we'll see you again soon thank you so much and to everybody who makes these shows possible i have to say thank you for making us have the opportunity of seeing homes like this we'll see you again soon thank you my name is chad home shopper show goodbye


When you're getting clean and sober and picking the 12-step program, should you go with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous? That's exactly what we're talking about in this video, so stay tuned. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem of focus on the solution. A question I get all the time from people trying to get clean and sober, decided to go into a 12-step program is, do I pick AA or NA? So, please do me a favor and share this video, because you might know somebody who is trying to make the choice, they don't know what to do. And there's a lot of questions, and I really encourage you guys to ask me questions down in the comments. I do a ton of groups where I just open it up for like literally an hour and just say, ask me questions about 12-step programs, because I'm here to educate people, dispel some of the myths, and maybe guide people in the right direction. Alright? So, real quick disclaimer, like I was doing these videos about 12-step programs, I am not affiliated with any of these programs. I am not a spokesperson. I am not the end-all, be-all. I am merely sharing my experience and some of my opinions, okay? Alright, so my personal experience, I've mentioned in other videos that I quote-unquote tried AA, and what I mean by that is I didn't try anything. I just sat in a room, zoned out, stared at a clock, right? So, this last time I got clean almost six years ago, I had actually never even heard about narcotics anonymous. So, when the guys in my sober living house were talking about narcotics anonymous, I'm like, huh, maybe AA didn't work for me, because I'm a drug addict, because part of my story is I started off with alcohol, but moved into prescription painkillers, right? So, I started going to narcotics anonymous meetings, but like, it didn't take long for me to start feeling different. Like, I have this brain, and a lot of us struggle with this, where it notices the differences rather than similarities. Our brain is trying to separate us from everybody else sometimes, and make us think that we're this unique creature. So, when I was hearing these stories in N.A., people were talking about slam and dope, and stealing and robbing, and the things they did, and I'm like, dang, that's pretty hardcore. So, my brain starts telling me, dang, Chris, you're way too much of a wuss to even be part of N.A. But then I didn't feel like AA was my place, because I was a drug addict, right? Well, I just want to make very clear, and this is something that we need to start doing, is noticing like, it's not what these programs are presenting to us. It's the way our brain's processing it. It's the way our brains are telling us what's right and what's wrong. So many of our thoughts are false, right? So, I was the problem. So, I just realized that I needed to pick a program, especially when I got to the point where I realized that I needed to sponsor and I needed to work the steps. So, which one did I choose? So, I was going to two to three meetings a day, okay, for like months and months and months.  So, from my experience, okay, now listen, I got sober in Fresno, California, and I'm going to come back to this point in a minute. But, my experience with the two different types of meetings was this. In Narcotics Anonymous, the meetings I went to, I noticed a lot of people sharing about the problem but not much of the solution, right? Like, when I go into a meeting, I am waiting for someone to say something that can potentially save my life. So, when I go to a meeting and they're just kind of like open discussions or something like that, and someone's just kind of like complaining about their day. Now, don't get me wrong, complaining about your day, that's part of what we do in meetings. But, what's the solution? You know what I mean? Because sometimes I go to an NA meeting and like, man, like, I just felt bummed afterwards. I almost wanted to use. Now, when I went to AA meetings, I saw way more people sharing experience, strength, and hope. They gave me this hope. So, no matter how bad their day was, they were offering solutions. They were saying what solutions they were going to do. Like, after this meeting, I'm going to call my sponsor. I'm going to go make an amends to this person.  And I was like, okay, cool. It just seemed like they had their stuff together just a little bit more. Now, I do want to make it very clear. 90% of the meetings I went to my first year were Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  Yes, that's true. Now, why did I go to NA meetings more? I will be 1000% honest with you. There was better eye candy. I like checking out the ladies now. I didn't date any of them or flirt with any of them. But at least I knew if the meeting went kind of stale, I could at least check some chicks out, right? And like, I joke about this and I say this to my clients. Like, literally whatever gets your butt in the seat at a meeting, run with it. Like, there was one meeting I went to that had free food. I always went to that meeting. Like, whatever gets you there, go, okay? So basically, I saw more of a solution in AA. I like this, some of the structure and some of the format. So funny story is I ended up meeting my AA sponsor at an NA meeting. And that's a whole nother story about how to get a sponsor. But I ended up working the AA program. So now I just want to jump into some of what I see are the pros and cons of both programs. So the first thing I will say is my personal experience in Fresno, California was I didn't like the NA meetings as much. Now here in Las Vegas, the NA meetings are phenomenal. I can say with absolute certainty that if I would have gotten sober in Las Vegas, Nevada, I would have worked the NA program. Every time I've gone to an NA meeting here in Las Vegas, like, I am moved. Like, the people there, like they're the way they share and like the way they sponsor, like, this is just phenomenal. So like, I just want to make that clear because just where you are in your area, like maybe one meeting is better than the others. So some of the pros and cons about AA, AA is the original. They're the source, right? I remember hearing one of my clients actually share. She's like, you know what, like, you know, when I was going to get drugs, when I was going to get drugs, I didn't want to go to the middleman. I wanted to go to the source. And that's something that I kind of found with AA. It was kind of my thought process. Like, this was the original. Literally every 12 step program is built off of and branches off of Alcoholics Anonymous. So like that big book, like I was able to get in there and like this was the original stuff. Now, a couple of the drawbacks of AA. One of them is, is that there is not a structured when it comes to step work. Okay. So like what that means is like there's no step working guide, which they have in narcotics anonymous. So if you have 50 people in the room and all have 50 different sponsors, everybody might work their steps differently. So sometimes when you're sharing back and forth and trying to get somebody's experience with the steps, like they might have worked their steps a little bit differently, although the overall experience should be the same if you worked it thoroughly. All right. One of the other drawbacks that I found for me personally, it was just something that kind of was for me. And I mentioned this in my last video about atheists and 12 step programs. There was, there was much more about spirituality and it really, it felt a little bit more religious and that might have been the way my brain was processing stuff. Now, as far as narcotics anonymous goes. So with narcotics anonymous, obviously they have the step working guide. So the structure is, is the same for everybody if you're working out that step working guide. So for example, me and like two or three of my buddies would go to like a Starbucks, work on our steps and all of them would be doing the same thing in their steps. And they're like, Oh Chris, what are you doing? And it was something completely different. And they were, so theirs was a little bit more structured. Now, one of the better things about NA that I did enjoy was they focused on spiritual principles more than spirituality. Now, what does that mean? Like this is something that was huge for me because the spirituality aspect was such a difficult thing for me to overcome. But in NA, they focused on just like being a better person. Like what are spiritual principles, right? Honesty, patience, tolerance, understanding, forgiveness. Like basically the good qualities of a human being. Like it is very difficult for someone to sit there and hear about spiritual principles and say, No man, that sounds like a terrible idea to be nice, kind, generous, being of service, helping other people. That sounds crazy. Like you can't really argue with that logic. You know what I mean? So the fact that they promoted spiritual principles, like do you do the right thing when nobody is looking?  Like what are these things? What are your motives? You know what I mean? And I really liked how they promoted that. At the end of the day, I will say this.  Go to as many as possible. Go to a variety of them.  Try the other ones. Try crystal meth anonymous, cocaine anonymous, heroin anonymous. See where you feel comfortable. All right? Like I know dozens and dozens and dozens of alcoholics who work the narcotics anonymous program. I know even more people who are drug addicts who work the alcoholics anonymous program. There is nothing that says you can't work the other program. It's wherever you feel the most comfortable. I have a few minutes left, so let me just get this rant out of the way real quick. Whether you identify as an alcoholic or an addict is completely up to you. But please be respectful of the meeting you're going to. Like I see some people who are so thick-headed and stubborn and they go to AA. They're like, I'm going to say I'm an addict because that's how I identify.  For example, like if you came over to my house, which I hope you don't because that'd be creepy. Like if you came over to my house, I wouldn't ask you to take your shoes off. I have tile floors. I just don't really care.  Am I going to go? No, I'm not taking my shoes off. I don't take my shoes off of my house. So I'm not going to take my shoes off of your house. Like you'd be a jerk if you did that. So please out of respect for the meeting, identify as whatever the meeting is.  Like that's just what we do, okay? It's purely out of respect. Now, sometimes when I was going to three meetings a day, I might go to two NA meetings and one AA meeting.  It goes a million miles a minute. So I might accidentally say I'm an addict in an AA meeting.  And I've never personally experienced it, but I've heard about it before. Like it is absolutely ridiculous to me when somebody in AA asked somebody who identifies as an addict or mentions drugs in a share to leave a meeting. Like that blows my mind, okay? Here's why. People are coming there to have their life saved. And you're going to ask them to leave a meeting over something that trivial, especially when in the big book, in the big books of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson talks about how he used drugs too. So this is something that I dislike about some meetings. But like I said, I've never personally experienced it. So please be respectful, but I don't think it's right to kick somebody out of a meeting for something that trivial. Okay? So anyways, like I said, please do me a favor and share this video. A lot of people have this question, which one do you pick? Like find which one works for you. All right? But if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you are new here, not only do I make videos about addiction recovery, but I make a ton of videos about mental health. Click that little round subscribe button and be sure to check out my entire Ask an Attic playlist right there. Okay? Thanks so much for watching. Don't over complicate things and I will see you next time.


About 12 minutes ago the aircraft carrying Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor left Chinese airspace and they're on their way home. They boarded at about 730 Ottawa time along with Dominic Barton Canada's ambassador to China. These two men have gone through an unbelievably difficult ordeal. For the past thousand days they have shown strength, perseverance, resilience and grace and we are all inspired by that. I want to thank their families who've been there for them supporting them in every way they could and supporting us in the work we've done to secure their release. I want to thank the countless diplomatic and other Canadian officials who have been tireless over the past two and a half years to secure the return of these two Canadians. I want to thank our allies and partners around the world and the international community who've stood steadfast in solidarity with Canada and with these two Canadians and finally I want to thank Canadians who have kept them in our thoughts and remain determined in the core value that Canadians have of standing up for each other and looking out for each other. These two men have been through an unbelievably difficult situation but it is inspiring and it is good news for all of us that they are on their way home to their families. There are 12 minutes ago, Michael Covrig and Michael Spavor left the Chinese airspace on their way home. They boarded the plane with our ambassador to China Dominic Barton. These two men have lived for more than a thousand days an incredible test. They have made sure that every step of resilience is taken and they are an inspiration for all of us. I want to thank their families who have been there to support them and to help us in the work that we have done to free them. I want to thank countless diplomats and officials who have dedicated hours, days, months, years of their careers to bring these two Canadians back and I also want to thank our international allies who have been there, in solidarity with Canada and with these two Canadians at each step. Finally, I want to thank the Canadians themselves. From one end to the other, from this country, you have been there, keeping these two Michael in your thoughts, in your prayers and you have shown that we are there, one for the other, when we are in difficult times. I have always been, I will always be impressed by the strength of the character of these two men, as we all are.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another Dolby Photoshop tutorial and this one is going to show you the new select subject and the new selection tools that use the cloud, how to enhance them and we'll even compare which ones are better. Okay, I've got a picture of a cactus here open, now normally you'd go to one of your selection tools like, pardon me, I'll go to like the object selection, quick selection, etc. In this case I'm going to go to select subject, in this case the cactus is the subject and I'm going to click on select subject, but before I do that you're going to see this new down arrow. We have two options, we have the device which is the default one which is set up naturally and then we have the new one which is cloud which offers detailed results. Let's click on the device and see what we get when I click on select subject. You're going to see it selects most of the cactus on the right, it misses here, it misses this part in here as you can see and it's missed the top of this cactus or the bottom of the cactus, pardon me, and it missed the entire piece here. So it's not, it's not very good, although this is a very difficult one to do, but anyways I'm going to go ahead and go to select, deselect, now we're going to go to the new options and to enable it, here's the first step, you want to go to your preferences. For me I go to photoshop preferences and then under image processing you're going to see a new option here, you're going to see select subject processing, it's defaults to device quicker results, now I'm switching it to cloud detailed results. Keep in mind that this is now processed in the cloud, it is not processed on your computer so your computer is no longer the bottleneck, it is now done in the cloud. I'm going to click on okay and now we're going to do the same one but we've got the new option. I'm going to go back to select subject but now you're going to see when I click that down arrow that cloud is selected. Okay good, now click on select subject and watch this. I know what it's going to do because I've run it before, it took a few extra seconds but when I zoom in you're going to notice that this cactus which was entirely missed, this piece of the cactus was collected and it was selected in this version. This cactus piece here also selected, it's done an excellent job and it also doesn't have, it didn't also select the blue middle piece in between the cacti like it did in the previous one, so that's how you enable it, that's a comparison. Thanks for watching, ton more stuff coming up, stay tuned.


What's up everybody once again it's Brand Man Sean and today is the first video in my rebranding series and the first method that we are going over is the pull-out method. Now what is the pull-out method exactly? Well I give you a hint there are two musicians who have done this so well. Number one is her that's capital H-E-R, her she's an R&B singer and also Marshmello he's an electronic music producer. Now if you don't happen to know either one of these you will start to know them by the end of this video and why what they did was so great for how they rebranded themselves. Now what's really interesting about both of these individuals is they have a mysterious brand who is her who is Marshmello. Well I'm about to tell you. Her real name is Gabby Wilson but when her first came out nobody knew this for a while. You can see Gabby Wilson do an interview on Sway in the morning 4 years ago and she is amazing she plays a lot of different instruments her voice is dope she's just a dope artist all together she was out there and moving up that artist's letter. In terms of Marshmello his real name is Christopher Comstock and when he was originally rising in the music game he went by .com for his producer name. Of course there's music out there interviews with him as just Christopher Comstock aka .com as well. So here's the three things that are important to use to pull out a method. Number one get in the game and when I'm talking about getting the game if you notice once again both of these people Gabby Wilson and Christopher Comstock were already in the game they were moving up the ladder they were making a name for themselves however it only went up to a certain level they weren't huge artists but they had enough energy around them in the industry where they start to at least be known more so by the names behind the scenes not necessarily having a huge fan base themselves. Number two is absence this is when the pullout happened you got out there you started to move you started to develop a little bit of an audience however you pull out you're gone what happens to you for two years three years both of them were gone for at least two years Gabby was probably about three or maybe even four why is this part so important because just being absent is one of the easiest ways to rebrand when you're going people kind of forget about you out of sight out of mind especially when you haven't gotten to a certain level in the first place there's a lot of people who didn't get to know you in the first place so you don't even have to rebrand to most people. Number three this is where it gets a little bit tricky but rollout the rollout method matters how you come back out that second time around will be determining your new brand at being away for a while once you pull out you don't really have to worry too much about what people are going to think about you when you come back you just have to come back the important thing is how you guide them with your new brand what is your new brand going to be and what do you want to be perceived as this is why using the pullout method it's so particular to actually having to get a certain level of rise and notoriety within the industry even if it's just with the people behind the scenes is so important when these people go throughout their rollout method there's a certain things that they could get done because they already had relationships in the industry when Gabby came out as her she already was signed at RCA so she had a team behind her and pushing her she didn't have to develop this brand all by herself and build awareness for it I did a video I'll put the link in the description below of her rollout strategy just the digital portion of it and how they really started to build an audience and awareness but a lot of it had to do with the silhouette but then how they pushed it heavily on social media with dope music on top of that the dope music has to be a part of it because her and Marshmallow both became music heavy they built their brands around their music their second time around because they didn't even reveal who they were in terms of their face and they didn't even do a lot of interaction in terms of personality so it's not like they were mysterious people who were coming out with comedy skits or anything like that as well that is an option maybe somebody'll do it that'll be kind of dope and what's so great about this is when people originally encountered these mysterious brands that got pushed to a lot of people it created this buzz this stronger than usual buzz because you're getting pushed you have all this dope music but everybody's wondering who is this person it became a little bit of a game and Easter egg as all these fans start to come together and start to research who this person might be in both situations if you notice I know that is Gabby Wilson and I know that is Christopher Comstock these names were revealed eventually not because they openly just said hey I'm this person but people did they're digging and now they don't necessarily deny it but it's not really the center of the attention so even though real fans know at this point it doesn't matter because they built their brand so strongly around this new mystery and around the music more than anything the fans don't really care too much about the real person in terms of their personality their brand isn't built off of that type of foundation like a lot of other artists are so once again to summarize the pullout method if you want to use this method you have to do a little bit of work you know to build up your name once again you don't have to necessarily be famous and even have an original buzz with a lot of fans but at least getting something going where you have some back-end resources you're moving without the industry throughout the industry and then you pull out the game you go behind the scenes maybe you're just writing for people you're building other relationships however you do that when you come back you have a brand in their case a mysterious brand that you allow to build buzz and you're using all of these resources around you all of these connections that you built while you were behind the scenes to now push your brand forward because your rollout matters when you hit that second time you want to hit hard and that's the pullout method I want to know what you guys think in the comments below once again I put the her rollout method how they did that on digital in the description below go ahead and check that out that video is like two years old maybe at this point but it's still true so maybe it's helpful other than that if you liked this video go ahead hit that like button if you like it you might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe