This is covering the spread part of the fan dual podcast network We have officially made at the start of the 2022 NFL season is coming up tonight We got Rams and versus bills We are here to break down the entirety of week number one from an NFL betting perspective I am joined today by Ryan Williams. We're gonna have a blast breaking down week number one and getting you some good bets For this week over on fan dual sportsbook This is covering the spread right here on the fan dual podcast network and number fire calm My name is Jim Sonis. I am a senior writer and analyst for number fire calm joined here as it will be most Thursdays by Ryan Williams you can check out Ryan on Twitter at Ryan Alexander underscore W Ryan We got NFL coming up tonight. We got NFL this weekend. It is a great time to be talking to you How are you doing today? I'm doing great Jim I appreciate you having me on on covering the spread. You've been you've been putting out massive work here You took the vacation a little bit over the summer. It took a little hiatus from Twitter people were You know emailing and reaching out on Twitter and DMs and fan dual Where has Jim Sonis been all summer long and then you come back and you start firing off these podcasts left and right You got the cover in the spread. You got the heat check. You got everything that you're doing with mlb So I'm just happy you're able to fit me into your schedule Well, see Ryan, you're talking about the travel as if it's in the past But I'll be seeing you this weekend in Chicago for a fan dual fan fest It's coming up at guarantee rate field out in Chicago So I get to meet you in real life where it talks and batting at 6 30 at the White socks stadium.  I guess I never asked this Yeah, I don't think we ever talked about it. I'm a cubs guy I'm actually named after ryan sandberg if you can You know believe that my mom was a Transplant from the west coast and kind of just came in in the 80s cubs. She liked that player But shout out shout out to my grandmother who decided that nobody'd be able to spell my name right if it was ryan So it went with the traditional spelling of ryan and that's how that comes but uh, but yeah, I've probably been to Kamisky the cell guaranteed rate field whatever you want to call it More times than and wriggly because I grew up on the south side Okay, I I tried to get my convinced my wife to name our dog uh byron So Luckily your parents more successful in the baseball negotiation naming rights So uh, and I I think I appreciate your grandma as well ryan. He's pretty tough. So Good looks on the ryan is there and ryan if you have not heard his voice before if your new lists are coming to spread We've had him on a couple of times. I did a show with ryan talk player props every week Before monday night football. We did that every year We're talking player props for monday night football on monday on the same stream as well So that's gonna be a lot of fun But also we've had you on for our super bowl preview other stuff as well But ryan I think that it's it's fun to have you on here more regularly people like kind of get to know you a little bit But people who don't know your background here and your I guess like your betting flair You know, what is your overall betting process? I'm a numbers based person, uh, but that's also It has its flaws. It's not for everyone. What's the process look like for you from a betting perspective? Yeah, well, we've talked extensively kind of about my process as it relates to Dfs right jim and in playing daily fantasy and what that's become and what that means and I kind of carry over That same mindset to the the betting field I mean, there's obviously Sharper people who have been doing it a lot longer than than I have but you really for me It's it's looking at the trends and looking at the data that you know Puts on paper the same way that you would be assessing A dfs lineup for me now There's some people that do betting that don't even do dfs But I'm just saying that the same knowledge I think translates and what I really like to do is attack the player props market You know me. I'm always talking about, you know, how can we everybody's looking at the the totals the spreads? um The money line and and well, that's well and good and that's where a lot of the content is focused But vegas is Vegas is vegas for a reason. I mean they can set these numbers and they are like some of the most accurate things We don't see like what happened last year when it was armageddon week for vegas because they lost so much money I I had it written down somewhere, but I just remember that weekend where they you know Those are favorites one and people were just like people tend to get favorites. So it was it was a rough week there I remember that yeah Yeah, rough week. So it's like when you're looking at these player part markets and even the anytime touchdowns I mean we'll talk about you know specific games later But when you're looking at some guys and you know, maybe a player's Not actually ruled out at the start of when the player props are released You can get good numbers on their receiving props rushing props passing props anytime touchdown things of that nature and and when you're when you're laying those bets whether it be, you know If you have units set or if you have a monetary dollar set You're you're able to make up for you know, if you're hitting 50 percent of spreads totals or less than Uh, that that's not really going to equate in your in your ROI is not going to look that enticing But when you're hitting these player props at 2 to 1 3 to 1 5 to 1 and you're hitting that at a 50 percent clip Now all of a sudden you're looking at that ROI start to increase just on a little bit of a success rate. So Yeah, that's kind of that's kind of where I land on in the betting betting world of things You're just looking for value and that value could be finding something where the implied odds are 33 percent that the odds of it actually happening are 37 percent, you know You're looking for those edges and those edges will not always will usually not be super large but I think that you're right in pinpointing that you're more likely to find a larger edge in the Less bed into markets, which are the player props I already talked about some spreads some money lines and totals throughout the podcast for today But like I said, we're talking with you about um The player props for monday night football coming up this monday and also a full player prop betting preview with jj zacharyston will be on this Feed later on today on thursday talking about jj's favorite player props and jj will be with us Throughout the season as well to talk some player props But of course, we'll talk about them here too with you because why would we not do that? We're going to dive in two week number one in just one second at first the college football in the nfl now both here It's time to get into the action early this season help get you started fandals sportsbook new fandals sportsbook customers Can get a no sweat first bet up to $1,000 whether it's spreads Money lines or props odds for that and more are available on the fandals sportsbook app Just sign up place your first bet and fandals will give you up to $1,000 back in free beds if you don't win There's no better place to get ready for the football season than on fandals america's number one sportsbook An official sports betting partner of the nfl must be 21 plus and president air in select states First online real money wager only refund issued is non-withdrawable free bets that expire 14 days after receipt Restricts his apply see terms at sportsbook dot fandals dot com gambling problem Call 1 800 gambler over the fandals dot com slash rg in arizona 1 800 next step or text next step to 5 3 3 4 2 in connecticut 1 8 8 8 7 8 9 7 7 7 7 Or visit ccpg.org chat in louisiana 1 8 7 7 7 7 7 0 stop in new york 1 8 7 7 8 hope and wire text Open y in tennessee call the red line at 1 800 8 8 9 9 7 8 9 in y oming 1 800 5 2 2 4700 or in west virginia 1 800 gambler dot net now we will talk a bit about the thursday night game at the end of the show We'll put that at the end in case you're listening here on friday saturday sunday You don't want to skip pass that we'll talk about some brief thoughts on bills versus rands later on But let's start things off here with an nsc north divisional battle. Unfortunately, not your bear's ride But it is the packers at the vikings right now the packers are two and a half point favorites The uh total here is 47 and a half and this green bay offense looks a whole lot different that it did last year They've got no davante adams david bhakti arias back, which is good, but uh some coaching personnel changes as well So i want to ask you ryan Can the packers get the job done in what is i think at least a pretty tough assignment on the road Yeah, you're gonna really be looking at who's suiting up for green bay I mean we pretty much have known that this is going to be wide receiver roulette Even though patrick mahomes, I guess was the first one to say it for the chiefs that like you're never Going to know who the wide receiver for kansas city is going to be i think that's the same thing here rogers has been very vocal about the younger guys Not being able to you know catch the ball as he's as he's used to seeing and we know that erin rogers in the past Has not had a good relationship with rookies or young receivers, but that's pretty much all that he has So christian watson looks like you know, he's trending on the right direction here Um, what's the deal with alan lasard who all of a sudden you know at the end of preseason was popping up on the injury report And probably is one of his most trusted Confidants in the wide receiver group and then you're looking at a guy like robert tonion Who's looking healthy and can play so i think there probably is enough there considering the run game too and i'm really excited to see the viking side of the ball as well And and i i like the total Gem especially with it moving moving back a full point opened at 48 and a half I got it at 48 and a half and i'm happy to get it at 47 and a half or 47 Especially if they start ruling guys out i think that will start to see it come down This is a divisional matchup like you said most people are tending to think that Especially in week one divisional opponents come out there the packers defense is expected to be a little bit better As well too so that will start to trend things i think down on this game Especially the the more uncertainty that we get and i'm willing to embrace that because we have two We know the erin rogers is going to throw the ball at a heavy clip We know on the other side of the ball that the minnesota vikings have tried to move pace and that was back with when Mike zimmer was there that these teams were you know, they were still trying to be As as efficient through the air as they could possibly be with curt cousins and now you bring in kevin o'Connell And i just think it's going to be all out on the field This is at home in in us bank stadium in minnesota against a rival opponent like green bay They are not trying to go down and lay down and just be like oh we'll get out with a win Like i think they want to stick it to them I think they want to see that they're the top of the division and so on the other side We love when erin rogers can be in a position to push them to push the bell So on the side of things, you know the number increasing up by a full point as well two and a half To the packers from one and a half that kind of makes me worry But i'm gonna attack it from the total standpoint. It actually is one and a half I I think it moved after I recorded it. So I like had this graphic up. It was one and a half I changed it to two and a half and now it's back to one and a half again So let's just change the graphic mid show, you know, why not? It is back to one and a half now and I think that's appropriate because My numbers have this as a point eight nine point game in favor of the packers so Not enough where i'm looking to bet it its situation where there's not a big enough edge there I can't go towards the vikings money line is there a minus one or two and to do the the packers favored I think to me this winds up being a stay away in terms of the side in terms of the In terms of the money line as well because it is a pretty evenly matched game My numbers you at the exact same way I don't talk about the total because my numbers you this is being a very efficient game It's the fourth most efficient aggregate offensive efficiency game on the slate for week number one And most the games above it have very high totals We've got rams bills. We have chargers raiders and then she's cardinals The reason this one is down is because the packers run at this like sluggish sluggish pace But I kind of get what you're saying as well where they're They're still going to be efficient and that doesn't matter at the end of the day as well The vikings should be faster than they were last year based on their pass rate and stuff like that so I am Annoyed by the packers pace and it does bother me But I do still think that I'm on board with you where 47 and a half I think that's probably the way to go with this game if you were to bet one of the more traditional markets Is leaning that way like yes the pace annoys me But there are two very efficient offenses my numbers account for the fact that green I think I'm green may projected to be one of the best defenses in the entire league this year You just don't pull that up quick like it's accounting for that and still views as being an efficient efficient game overall so I think that for me if I were to bet A anything within the traditional markets here, I would go with the total of 47 and a half. I agree with you there Yeah, it it's just one of those things and you're looking at where public money is coming on on this gym And everybody is hammering the under on this and you can see that clearly because the total is being bet down I know that it's 47 across some places 47 and a half With the hook there is what is what we have and I think that it'll continue to do so and that's when I just You know, I just tend to just keep jumping on it When when stuff like that happens and I have such a Such a surety that you know, it'll go the different direction And you know, we always talk about fading fading the public So I just you know kind of see where the money comes in and where where my beliefs align and try and take advantage of that Yeah, 47 and a half right now minus 115 on the under which probably implies that fan dual There's decent odds they get down to 47 as well. So maybe a wait and see situation see if it gets down to 47 I would wait till I think Alan Lazar's probably not going to play based on missing practice on wednesday Once he's ruled out and make it down to 47. Maybe you're getting 46 and a half That's the situation where once we see that movement. I might buy in at that point Okay, let's go out here to an afc west bad We got the raiders at the chargers chargers three and a half point favorites here right now total 52 and a half and the chargers work this all season has been on improving their defense They got Khalil Mack for a second round pick They got jc jackson in there and free agency, but jackson likely to be out this week So ryan can the chargers live up to the hype and cover here against what is a pretty feisty divisional opponent? Yeah, I'm I'm not as interested In in the the spread on on this one on either side The only reason being is because they're again We're talking about where the public is and where the money's coming in 77 of the money is on the spread for los vegas in this game and in 86 percent is coming in On the los vegas money line So you could and that's exactly where I would align which is the only reason that makes me nervous But you're looking at a josh josh mcdaniel's team. I mean he starts off the preseason In the hall of fame game, right? And he's like playing josh jacob's and making people go crazy and like talking about how, you know Explosive they're going to be in the in the writings on the wall there. They're bringing a guy like davante adams They're working to get darren waller resign. They're doing some things on the defense aside But not great and even if you're talking about jc jackson being out for this game too Like this is another one the total is going to be, you know, that number is is crazy People are are going to really try and shy away from this on week one when you're talking about 53 on a hook I believe is where I last saw that But these are two prolific offenses We just saw them play each other really not that long ago jim when you think about it the week 18 matchup It's do or die the team that wins gets in and just all the crazy drama that went along with that Maybe that maybe that sparks something to keep this total a little bit down But just the way that these two teams play you're looking at the chargers from a year ago top three In in passing great, then you're looking at the raiders a year ago before mcdaniels was even there with all that was going on They were a top 10 team the top seven I believe in passing great So that just all of that just speaks to me is that this game is going to be a bonanza and that's really exciting So I love getting action on this game. It's just a matter of I want to try and do it where I'm not going to be disappointed with you know 90 of other people on it Yeah, so what's what is your favorite route for getting exposure to this game? So I do think the the total is enticing over 52 and a half is minus one of six There's no jc jackson. Um, I think that uh, I think that that's a factor for sure The raiders often sufficiency tanked after the henry rugs incident last year But now they add divante adam. So you're getting potentially a more efficient More efficient raiders offense. You're getting a chargers defense that still has flaws with jackson being out This I expect the chargers offense to go nuclear the entire year So I think that the total if we're looking at this game might be enticing from me What's your route for getting exposure to this game if it's not going to be via the side? Yeah, I think that I would definitely look at the look at the total as well I mean this is going to be a game that's kind of heavily talked about so if you're not really looking at the side But I do kind of we're looking at the chargers as being one of the lone home favorites on this week to open up Week one of this season. We got a lot of home dogs That are that are just littering the slate and so, you know with the chargers being the lone one and not really getting That much attention. I like going to the chargers side here. There's just a lot more Um There's a lot more that I can that I can put my hat on for the chargers side There's a lot of question marks that we that we need to see with the raiders first and just because they're getting Kind of so hyped up and I kind of I was you know talking with some people before the season about You know, should we be putting money money on Derek Carr at mvp yet where his odds were You know, just just because this is this is it for him Like this is we've given you all the pieces all the way of the land Like if this doesn't work out for the raiders, I don't really think that it starts with Just mcdaniel's it starts with Derek Carr. So because all those question marks I would still try and look at the look at the side here Um with the chargers get three and a half with the hook Yeah, I do show a bit of value there either the chargers by 4.76 points So about a point uh 1.25 points of value there for me It's not enough where I want to bet it. I typically want a bit more I think their cover odds are a bit around 52 percent, which is basically where they're implied to be So I can't quite get there But if I were to if you forced me to pick a side it would go to the chargers My numbers love them this year as with every single year because why would they not? but Not quite enough for me to bet that one there. So let's uh go to the sunday night game We got the buccaneers two and a half point favorites on the road Against the dallas cowboys at jerry world totally here is 50 and a half and Both these seems missing key pieces and for unique one And a lot of it is on the offensive side because we got the injuries along the offensive line for the buccaneers I'm assuming no chris godwin. He's not clear for contact just yet for the buccaneers But uh still to be determined on that one Of course with tyron smith injury with the cowboys no michael gallup. So a lot of offensive injuries here What are you seeing in this game ryan? It's it's tyron smith for me is what it comes down to. I mean that seems so rudimentary and basic jim But it's like this this dallas team is it's drecklin hide when this guy is on the field and when he's not And even then you can take it a step further in fact during liall collins Who's not there anymore on the offensive line who goes away and the efficiency numbers? For dak and the rest of this offense have dropped by Even even like a full, you know yard per play When these guys are not on the field and tyron smith is really the key there So when we're looking at two and a half here, you know getting under that key number of three With the bucks and just all the drama that's gone around with tom brady and bruce arians You know not not being there and him coming back and what's going on with the wide receiver core We don't know chris godwin could actually end up playing in this game as crazy as that seems people thought he was going to start on the The pup list um It's it's just one of those things i get it it's at home and people will probably be looking at last year these Two teams faced it was an explosive game and the dallas was able to cover by two here And that was in tampa bay now. This is in dallas, but i just i just feel like with dallas like I really just think the writings on the wall for this team to really struggle this year They have a tough schedule doesn't give them any, you know favors to start off the season like this with tampa bay I really like getting the tampa bay side of things on this just given all the all the stuff that we know about What dallas is dealing with on the injury front? Yeah, I was honestly kind of surprised when I pulled up this number when I was first looking at week one spreads It was a while ago obviously, but like I was a bit surprised because I was expecting given the negative sentiment around dallas This number to be a bit larger So two and a half I think that you know it was it was kind of shocked me and this dallas games You were talking about that uh total moving against you for the uh the packers and the the vikings This was that game for me last year where I had dallas covering the spread and it kept on moving I think got to like nine points at one point before kickoff in that game And just like I was losing my mind like what am I missing here? Like why why is the movie against me like this is the worst feeling in the world This week this year that's cardinals cheese, but you know i'm not going to talk about that again That's just an hideous ride uh for me But like it just kept on moving and moving moving and now I'm wondering if the weird vids around tom brady the the injuries are on the offensive line I'm curious what's keeping this number buoyed it to a nap. It was one and a half. I think at one point yesterday Uh, but like I'm curious why it's just two and a half given All the odd stuff happening at the cow ways, right? It could just be because the bucks cancel out their own weird stuff right now Right. Yeah, exactly the the offensive line I'm glad you brought up that point jim because yes You're talking about the starting center and then the backup center both getting hurt In the off season. We know how much tom brady relishes at the fact that he can You know be in the pocket and and feel safe and secure and this del is you know defense Especially on the front, you know, they're definitely going to try and get in there and get pressure But they are a team that likes to gamble a lot and so if you know Tom brady is is able to kind of pick them apart and have his way and then it's you know Kind of just the Leonard for net show and we're forcing dak to throw it to you know cd And I guess pollard because they you know, they've lost some p offensive weapons on the on that side of the ball I don't show it's no disrespect. Um, but uh, but yeah, I just Even all things considered like the things that are factoring in on the dallas side for me Just far outweigh what's going on with with the bucks in tampa bay and having some some semblance of what we remember From this team if you're getting a full tom brady, uh for for this game. I I got to take that side Yeah, uh, noa brown your single game lineups ryan, you know, there we go Excited to roll out noa brown the wide receiver two for the dallas cowboys in the europe or lower 2022 What could possibly go wrong there? Okay, so I've got a by bucks by 1.7 I thought I'd have value in the cowboys. I don't I think that for me This is stanway, but I think that if I were to bet I agree even though my numbers say bucks by 1.7 I lean towards you with the bucks minus two and a half there Let's open up the board to you ryan though because you got a lot of games on tap here for week number one outside of those three games What are your favorite bets available a fan dual sports book in week number one? Yeah, so, uh, there's there's two other games, uh, where I'm looking at The the sides actually, um, if you can believe that jim I want to pull up here not not gonna not gonna be the the homer and talk about what's going on here in Chicago But let's talk about another divisional matchup with the pittsburgh stealers going into sinton addy. I mean this This this is kind of it feels weird because it's michael trabisky and you know All of these things that are surrounding pittsburgh, but they're getting six and a half here They are on the road. I understand that but a divisional matchup These two teams have played slug fest like pretty much since mike tomlin has been there. Um And when you're looking at zack taylor and his record in week one, you know, that's not anything that really jumps off of the page here There's you know issues on sinton addy side of the ball too just as far as like this is going to be the first time We see that new and improved often to line unit together But there's the defense aside of pittsburgh's getting healthy and Mitchell trabisky for for whatever it's worth I mean you we're looking at been roff this burger for last year and I don't see Really that much of a difference especially when you're talking about if they do get pressure on him He can always use his legs to run been roff this burger didn't have that ability to do that So I think this ends up being more close than people realize getting that six and a half number Which really hasn't changed at all since uh this number opened But I still see a lot of money coming in on the sinton addy side That just makes me a little bit weary that people are kind of sure about this and that just goes to my whole Think about pittsburgh. I think in general of what the sentiment is around them that they can't You know all of a sudden win games because an aging been roff this burger isn't there I just I often's a line issues too I I get that but I still think that this team will be in it to win as long as mike tomlin's there And then the houston the houston side of things with indy. I'm a little Upsets not the good word But I mean we were getting this at eight and a half in this open eight and a half And I immediately just jumped on this number as soon as they made it available because Lovey teams and I you know being in chicago. I've seen lovey teams I've seen what he's able to do on the defense side of the ball We're getting you know first first time matt ryan with the new team But matt ryan was a guy I always tended to attack when he was in Atlanta, you know pretty much after the the collapse in the super bowl to the patriots And you know, I really think that houston if davis mills can just take care of the football On this side of things because that because of what the defense offers for indy I I do think that this number is just a little bit too high I mean at seven and a half I get it if you don't want to take it because it's moved to full point But this is one that I had pretty much been monitoring all off season. It's at home Again, we're talking about the home dogs that littered the slate and I just feel like houston You know, they shocked people last year with jacksonville even even for what that was worth Um, you know in that first week everybody thought that jacksonville with trevor lorence would kind of shine out But you know tyron taylor and company were able to make it happen So I like I like what houston's offering here at seven and a half as well. Yeah I'm on that one too. I had that at eight and a half. Like you said, we both got that at eight and a half I still have value though. It's at five point five five for me With the texans being underdogs there, but that's still almost two points of value So I do still think at seven and a half It's a worthwhile bet if you didn't get an eight and a half that's a bummer obviously But I do still think there's value there at seven and a half for the texans Feels good to be on the same page with you there. Also the stealers. I've got that as a bangles by six point one So less than six and a half. Um, okay, so I think that uh showing some value there I'm not sure if uh, we're just you know, reading off the same stuff I love it that feels good to to be on the same sides for week number one I'm curious if you'll agree with my favorite bet though for week one Among the ones we've not discussed talked about the texans earlier on talked about The giants plus six and a half when that was there I've talked about the stupid stupid cardinals enough. I don't need to worry about that And then the browns money line just not now move to even money So we won't talk about that the one I've not discussed in the show yet where I am showing value And it hurts Ryan, but it's the patriots plus three and a half against the dolphins I have this as the dolphins by one point one three points and like I get it I get the negative sentiment around the the patriots and the positive stuff around the dolphins I have the patriots projected to rank 16th and passing efficiency this year, which is worse than they were last year It's a good step down based on personnel changes based on Weirdness with the offensive coaching staff or whatever that is out there And I've got the dolphins projects to rank 11th, which probably is very high But you know bumping them up because of Tyree kill Jalen waddle For a full year there So I have the dolphins passing offerings projected to be good the patriots projected to be worse than them But I can't get to three and a half The secondary for the dolphins is banged up the defense for the patriots I think could be pretty good this year based on some of the personnel that they've got there so I don't recall a lot of times where my numbers are shown value in the patriots because they are a team people tend to have a lot of faith in That pendulum has swung and that's not the case anymore So I do like the patriots plus three and a half when it was a two and a half I wasn't going to bite but this has lengthened out to three and a half and I think that I'm going to dive in there and actually You know Suck it up and bet this Patriots team based on this number the humidity in in Miami does matter and it does bother me But it is is it worth two point four points, which is the amount of value I'm showing relative to the spread right now. I don't think so So I will go at the Patriots plus three and a half as the final addition for me here for week number one Ryan Should I be mad at myself for putting money on a an offense coach by Matt patricia and Joe judge? That doesn't it seems nauseating Jim But uh, you can you can you can take that and then factor in that This is bill bellichick going against a rookie head coach and you're getting three in a hook on that side of things I'm not going to say that they are a dark horse by any means but But what bill bellichick has done with the new england patriots has been able to keep them afloat like you said with the defense of personnel I think that they're you know people are Sleeping on them in that regard because they've always had pretty much a top tier or you know top half of the league defense When when it comes to that so they're not going to come out in this game and just roll over I think that a lot of the stuff from the from the playoff game against buffalo last year Lingers with this team lingers with bill bellichick and I really think they want to come out here Make some noise all that's been talked about was the patriots offense looked like Crap in the in the offseason mac jones can't get it done Who are the receivers and it's like they've never they've never had receivers that are household names Like the randy musting was a short lived, you know trial and error thing this this team has never Really invested in the offense aside the ball. It's the defense that kind of keeps it going and it's still it's still Tua I have faith in him. I think that you know, this will be a solid year for him I'm hoping that it is but when you're talking about week one to have this match up against the lingham patriots with the rookie head coach with question mark still in the running game Like it's it's left to be seen how this offense is really going to attack So I think getting three in a hug is It's favorable and especially with the public being on the miami side of the ball gym. I like where your heads at Yeah, I love to uh, I hope he does well. I think he's going to be I think that the the Hades received has been a bit annoying. I hope he does well But hopefully he holds off to week two. I'm doing that so I can get this uh, patriots plus three and a half Okay, we're gonna talk quickly here about our thursday night football just very briefly in case you've listened to this on friday But ryan any thoughts for you bills minus two and a half against the rams on thursday night to open up the season Yeah, I really I'm starting to really like The buffalo side of of things here jim and the rams have just been been so So tucked up. I mean the sharp money is coming there that always makes me a little bit nauseous But so is the public money as well too jim and you're just looking I'm I really am curious to see how matt stafford looks tonight like because that's gonna that's going to determine things for me All sees along with the rams this this lingering injury that he has and they've kind of been keeping it under wraps Shout out to shah mcbay for everything that he's able to do with with that team But we're looking at defending super bowl champs and being in week one not having a lot of success As well when it when it comes to you know that first game of the season now that all that being said Shaw mcbay is five and oh in in home opener So, you know, I get why people are leaning the ramside The buffalo bills on the other hand they didn't have that great Out of the division out of the conference. I believe record last last year We really like what buffalo was able to do towards the end of the season and taking control of their division However, I do feel like they have a lot to prove this year. They're the super bowl favorites I'm pretty much any sports book that you look at We have them as the super bowl favorites. I believe on fan bill sports book And I just josh allen and with Everything that this team offers on the offense and defense aside the ball if matt stafford is really not himself I feel like I can live with getting two and a half on the buffalo bills by when in this game by by a field goal So, uh, I I like getting the bills side of things going into thursday Yeah, the bills are number one of my power rankings right now. I am shocked by that I didn't think that'd be the case, but they are just in part because other teams have fallen a bit Tampa Bay because the line injuries other teams have dipped, you know, stuff like that But you know, I'm not taking the two and a half But I think they are up there for a reason the one that I like in this game is devon singletary over 60 and a half rushing plus receiving yards because He played every snap with the first team offense. I think in week two or week three the preseason So they did they did take james cook the god sack moths back once again But it doesn't seem like they've eaten into singletary's role, which was sick towards the end of last year So if i'm making a bet on this game, I would go with singletary over 60 and a half rushing plus receiving yards over at Fan will sportsbook. That's all we got for week number one Again, check out ryan on twitter at ryan alexander underscore w we're going to be back once again Later on today talks more props with jj zack a recent but ryan It was a delight to have you on the show for today I am excited to have you on for the rest of this year. Good luck to you week one I'll talk to you once again Monday to talk some monday-nev football with the russell wilson revenge. Sorry My bad the true lock. You know, he's not starting revenge game against the brockos Absolutely. I can't wait to get after it with you this season. Jim. Thanks for having me I expect a drew lock mazoo jersey on you on monday Just letting you know now and looking forward to meeting you this weekend in person in chicago as well Check out ryan on twitter at ryan alexander underscore w I am on twitter at jim sonnis make sure you are subscribed to the covering the spread podcast feed to get all these Podcasts they're posted. We do have our college football week two betting preview with ed fang and drew martin Post is already that is up on the covering the spread feed. And like I said player props to the jj. Zacharyson Coming up later on today. Thank you all for tuning in. Good luck with your week one bets It is a delight to have football back at our lives talk to you once again Sue this has been covering the spread right here on the fan duel podcast network


All right, I guess everyone is here. So we can go ahead and get started. My name is Ernest De Leon. I work for Morantis. I am the chief cloud solution architect there. So what I work on is a couple of different things. We work on obviously deploying and designing clouds, but also migration workloads in the cloud. There's my contact info. It's kind of been up there. So this presentation, I'm going to try to squeeze it into 40 minutes. We are the last one, so I'll stay afterwards if anyone has questions. I'll also try to leave some room at the end, but this is a pretty big discussion. This is a huge problem that people try to tackle. We don't often get to see the insides of how this gets done, so I'm going to try to elaborate as much as I can in this time period. So bear with me. So the overview is pretty simple, right? This isn't rocket science. It's actually fairly straightforward mathematics. It's just a matter of how you apply it and how you grab those numbers and how you massage them into what ends up being capacity management. So some of the things we'll cover, what is capacity planning? Why do we need it? Small and large scale clouds and how it differs. N10 lead times for capacity. I have some anecdotal numbers for you. As you know, we work with clouds. Our customers span the gamut from very small 5 to 10 node clouds up to thousands and thousands of nodes and dozens and dozens of clouds that span the globe in data centers, all the way up to telco scale. So we'll go into some of those numbers. Capacity inflection points and triggers, which are terms I use for how the capacity planning process is then used to actually grab capacity and bring it into the cloud. And the last thing is developing the process for capacity planning. And that's mainly because it's going to differ by what kinds of workloads you run, what the scale of the cloud is you're running. Your architecture, as you know, OpenStack doesn't have a single reference architecture. It's super flexible, so you can deploy it many different ways. So we'll dig into the process. And then you can kind of take that and apply it to your own data center. So the first thing is, what is capacity planning? Well, it's fairly simple. It's estimating the storage computer hardware, software, and connection infrastructure resources required over a future period of time. Obviously, because of time constraints, I kind of gauge this more towards the nova side of it or the compute side of it. But we use the same exact methodology to approach storage. So whether it's object or block, it comes kind of the same way. So why do we need it? Fairly simple. Cloud grows at a rate that you don't control. Your users have the ability to dynamically spin up and spin down resources. And their workloads shift depending on what they're doing. And you may not expect spikes in workloads. And this becomes incredibly difficult the smaller the cloud is. The larger the cloud is, it's a lot easier. And we'll show that when we kind of dig into the anecdotal numbers for this. Unlike the public cloud, so this is huge. And you can kind of debate whether Amazon does this or not. But when you're running a private cloud based on OpenStack, you now have access not only to the underpinnings of the infrastructure, but also you usually have a closer relationship with the users that are running workloads on your cloud, specifically the large demand users. And using a demand planning and forecasting kind of methodology there helps you because you gather more data points than you would normally get if you were not able to see the underlying infrastructure and the usage patterns. And not able to talk to that customer or that user directly and figure out what they're going to run now in the next six months in the next year, et cetera. And then the last thing is, so one of the biggest mistakes we make as operators of these clouds, if we do not do capacity planning correctly, is we try to use overcommit to solve these issues. And that ends up backing you in the corner at a certain point because inevitably you're going to get a workload in this cloud that is either CPU or RAM dependent and where you cannot have overcommit. And granted, you can create other availability zones or host aggregates or whatnot to move those workloads kind of into their own niche corner. But that's kind of not the right way to do it. So what we don't want to do is put ourselves in a position where we're using those kind of things to make up for the fact that we've incorrectly managed our capacity in the cloud. So small capacity clouds are very difficult to plan for, for a very simple reason. A user workload spike can break your model, right? This happens all the time. Anybody who's run a cloud gets a user on there and their application use grows. And there's a spike in usage. And all of your available capacity is gone. This is one of those things you want to avoid. Again, so on a small cloud, it's hard. On a large cloud, it's a lot easier. Large is easier just because, like it says here, right? The ability for a single user to spike to the point where they eat up all of your capacity is small, or it's limited, right? Now, you could have multiple users do that, but it's still unlikely. So we have to be diligent in monitoring the growth pattern on a regular basis, right? So when we get to the anecdotal numbers piece, we'll discuss that. But essentially, we're constantly gathering data. In most of our customers' environments, we're gathering data on a daily basis from the back end of the cloud that tells us aggregate instance counts, right? Utilization, we know the server counts, obviously, because we built the cloud and we've been adding capacity to it. And the last thing here is you never want to take a short-term solution to a long-term problem, right? So capacity planning is always a long-term solution. You're always looking at least six months, if not a year out. And primarily, that's because of lead times, right? And we'll get in a little bit more of what composes an end-to-end lead time for the purpose of managing capacity here. So the total end-to-end lead time includes a couple of things, right? So the first thing is the manufacturer lead time to get the servers to your door, depending on who the manufacturer is, depending on the type of hardware you standardized on, and then other things, right? Because you have things that are not under your control. It could take anywhere from three to four weeks to three to six months to get servers just to your door to the data center. That doesn't even count provisioning them in the cloud. The next thing is burning and testing. If you do that internally, right, which many of our customers do, some of them have it done by the vendor or the VAR who's in between. Rackstack cabling in the data center takes time, especially if you're running at scale. If you've got huge clouds, it's going to take several days for a team of guys to rackstack and cable all of those servers. The last thing is probably the easiest, at least if you're running Mirantis OpenStack. Fuel automatically provisions and pulls all the hardware into the cloud for you. But you still have to take that into account, right? That takes time. And it takes a person or people, depending on what your method is to do it. And if there are problems, someone has to fix them. A lot of times, an automated tool like Fuel will expose other problems you have in the infrastructure, like incorrectly cabled boxes, incorrectly servers that have the wrong size or amount of hard drives in them. These things kind of pop up in these tools, and you have to go back and fix that. The most volatile of all of these is the manufacturer lead time. Delays can happen for any kind of internal component problem. And depending on the scale at which you're operating on, that's another thing, right? You can go to the manufacturer and say, hey, I need 500 new servers, and I need them by two weeks from now. And they may not be able to deliver them to you, or they might. Or you might have a situation where a natural disaster causes a factory that makes hard drives to go offline, and then there's a shortage. And you can't get them, right? So you have to understand what that is. And you can work with your vendor or your VAR to understand what the typical lead time is for any of this, and just put that into your planning, for your capacity planning. And the last thing is, always look at this like you're a developer. Always pad the lead time, right? If you know that your capacity or your end to end lead time is going to take six weeks, then make your plan eight or 10 weeks. So you always have a buffer. And when we get into the numbers, you'll see why that becomes important. So here's the first of some anecdotal numbers. And I have about four of these charts to kind of show where all this three or four of them, I don't remember how many it is. Anyway, and I took a snapshot from March 2014 to March 2015, obviously, because these are representative of our customers clouds. And we're far enough enough out that this is not kind of a trade secret of any kind. I've also averaged the counts across five different clouds. The numbers are very similar across them and their workloads. So we're not giving away any kind of information here that no one else would know. And it gives you a picture of one year of utilization growth from end to end, which is big, right? At least in the open stack area. Most of the time you see snapshots of weeks, months, but this gives you a full year to year end. Next year, if I happen to do this again, we can go for two years and see what the utilization looks like. The data is from a single region within a large cloud. So these numbers came from customers that are running medium to large clouds. And this is a single data center, single region of many. I mean, most of these customers are running dozens of these, right? And then other regions numbers, like I said, we're similar. So there's not any kind of big discrepancy to where a small cloud is pulling down the numbers from an incredibly large one. So as you can see here, the chart starts very close to zero. And it goes all the way up to just shy of 12,000 instances. One region, one zone, one data center. The server count over time. Most of our customers, at least during this time frame, were standardized on 20 core servers. Part of the reason is it's kind of a best practice. If you guys used to be with VMware back in the day, then Eucalyptus, then Mirantis, these servers started coming out with massive amounts of cores, 40 cores or more.  So you don't want the smallest server possible, but you don't want the biggest. You want something right in the middle. So usually about 20 cores is where we put the limit. And you set your RAM requirements according to that. So if your customer tells you that your instance sizes are going to be of a certain kind, and you need at least four gigs of memory per physical core, then you adjust the sizing parameters of your servers. So as you can see, again, the servers, I think most of these started off with anywhere from 10 to 15. It was a small pod. And then over time, it grew to just shy of 1,000 servers in the region in one year. So that just tells you right there. You've scaled from 0 to 1,000 servers in the course of a year. So it gives you a good idea of how fast you have to order hardware. This is the capacity graph. So what this is showing is, based on these customers' instance types and flavors, how many instances could we hold in this cloud at any given time along this path? And then the next graph I'll show you will plot these three against each other. So you can see how this looks in real life. And, you know, big spoiler here, we managed to keep capacity ahead of demand, right? And that's kind of the idea. So again, starting at very few instances we could hold, all the way up to just shy, I think that actually tops out at just over 18,000 instances that can be hosted in this one region. And so this is where we plot the three against each other. So the server counts, as you can see, it's a fairly linear growth pattern. The instance count, it moves up a little bit more aggressively. And the capacity supported, it also moves in the general same direction, but you can see some differences in there, right? So you can see just after January of 2015, the instance count takes a more aggressive jump. And the reason is because at this point, more and more of the internal users of these clouds are becoming comfortable with using the cloud, and they're starting to use things like autoscaling, right? Whereas before, they were still doing the old lift and shift off of VMware and bare metal. They're now getting into using autoscaling groups, right? Because they've figured it out. So now the growth is kind of, you know, the ship has sailed. You just have to keep up with it. You can also see in the yellow line, right before January of 2015, it kind of loses its aggressive slant.  So the point at which you hit an inflection point and a trigger to get the capacity playing process or rather the hardware provisioning process kicked off is a lot sooner, right? And the number that you're doing, right? The amount of hardware you're ordering as a percentage of the total hardware you have in the cloud at that point is much bigger. And when you get up to a certain scale and you're seeing there that it's just shy of 10,000 instances, give or take, you now can back off that number, right? So whereas, and I'll show you another slide with those numbers roughly put there for you, but once you get up to that point, you know, up to that point, you're right at about a 50% utilization trigger where you need to go and start the provisioning process again. Once you get to a scale where you're up around 10,000 instances, then you can start backing it off to about 80%, right? So you're keeping a 20% buffer instead of a 50% buffer in your cloud, which, again, is why it's easier with a larger cloud to manage capacity as opposed to a smaller one. So capacity inflection points, right? So how do we look at this in a semi-pseudo mathematical way, right? Not a knee jerk, oh crap, we're out of capacity. So there are points at which the infrastructure utilization rate indicates that more hardware should be procured, right? So this is what starts the process, right, of provisioning additional hardware and additional capacity into your cloud. These inflection points are calculated based on the total size of the cloud, number one, the user growth patterns, and the total end-to-end lead times for provisioning, right? So we put those three together to generate what is our capacity plan model, right? So on small clouds, less than 50 nodes, we're looking at about 50% utilization. So the inflection point is 50%. Once we've utilized 50% of the available resources in the cloud, we trigger the process to provision more hardware. And then we add a 90-day growth number, right? So in that, what we're looking at is what's been the growth over the last 90 days? And we add that on to the top. And typically, that growth is about 50%. On a small cloud, right? So we were basically doubling the hardware or at the very least adding 50% of the original number, so it would be 50% growth, not 100% growth. On a medium cloud, which is 50 to 500 nodes, which is still kind of small in this scale, but we consider that medium, you're about 65% utilization, same number, right? So once you hit that number, you trigger the process again. On a large cloud, this is where it gets a lot easier, so over here, you're at over 500 nodes out there. You can get to 80% utilization, so that means that you can wait all the way until your buffer and your capacity is only 20%, and then you trigger that process, right? And a lot of times, at least on the 80% utilization number, we found that a 20% growth factor on the number of servers was just right, right? So if we go back to... If we go back, well, so these numbers are all based on the observation of numerous customer clouds, right? And it can vary depending on the workloads, but if we go back to this slide, you can see, right? So right after November 2014, that's where we started backing off, right? From the 50%, we backed off to the 80%, and left the 20% buffer. And from that point forward, instead of adding 50% capacity every trigger point, we only added 20% capacity every trigger point, and that still allowed us to keep ahead of the total capacity needed in this cloud by quite a bit. So that blue line ends at just above 12,000, and we've kept the available capacity just above 18,000. So we have capacity for, you know, 6,000 instances, right? These are not servers. And I can tell you from the next six, seven months now, those lines have become closer together, but we still manage to keep ahead of the curve, right? So we've not had to get in a position where we used overcommit ratios to solve this problem. So pretty easy way to keep track of it. So developing the process, how do we approach this, right? So the first thing is make sure you have a viable way to gather and store historical data about the usage of cloud resources. Almost all of this information you can get out of Solometer, right? So it's not any kind of special trick. The one thing you may have to kind of pull out separately is your physical infrastructure stuff to understand how many servers you have and if you're using different kinds of servers. So these numbers can also be broken down by different kinds of flavor types, right? So you have host aggregates with different types of hardware, entirely different hardware, then this capacity planning process will have to be applied to each of those differently, right? These numbers are looking at homogenous hardware, which is usually what we recommend. However, your workload may not be that, right? You may have workloads that can fit in a very generic homogenous environment and you may be running VoIP or media encoding of some kind that has to be on a certain type of hardware that's high performance, right? So you manage those capacities differently. Same process, just different numbers. Establish a demand planning process. So this is actually one of the most important things we found, right? We could sit there blind and just use numbers to say, okay, well, every month we're adding this much capacity, we're using this much capacity and just try to keep those lines separated all the way through that graph. What's a lot easier is to go to our big users and say, hey, we noticed that you're one of our major users, you use 1,000 instances this month. Do you have any kind of plan growth for next month? Are there, what about three months from now, six months from now, a year from now? Are there any major initiatives happening that are gonna cause your usage to spike? And some of these actually were huge. So we had instances where, or we had situations where some of these applications did, they gathered data from mobile access points and several times a year these mobile access points were put in things like this summit or other large conferences and they were gathering all of this data. So the normal workload this customer had might have been 1,000 instances, but whenever these large shows or summits or gatherings happen, that could spike up to four or 5,000 instances for a week or three days and then it drops back off. Now on a monthly scale, you're not gonna see that in these numbers, right? At the end of the month unless they just happen to have those instances on when we grab this data, but you will see it the day it happens. So that's the reason you need to keep those lines at least somewhat apart. You can't have them writing each other. The next thing is understand the full end-to-end lead time to bring the capacity into your cloud. Fairly simple, talk to your VAR, talk to your manufacturer, ask them based on this specific build, this bill of materials that I want from my servers, what's the average lead time, what's the longest lead time you've seen and try to work in the middle of that for your, at least for the procuring of the hardware part. Set automatic triggers to kick off the new hardware provisioning process when the capacity utilization reaches specific specified markers. So that's very simple, right? You've already decided where these inflection points are just based on the size of your cloud and you will trigger at that point the acquisition process for new hardware. And you also know that you've got the provisioning process afterwards and bringing all this stuff into the cloud. The last thing is revisit all of the above points on a regular basis and adjust the process as necessary. So this goes back to when those lines diverged on us or they kind of went opposite ways for a second there, we realized that our 50% planning model was not, well, that's great. We realized that our 50% planning model was not what we needed at that point, right? So we went back in there and we adjusted it and that's where we backed off to 80%, right? So you'll have to go back in there and do that on a regular basis. I think that once a month is enough but if you have the time to do that once a week that's even better, makes it easier for you. So the last thing is any questions. I'm sure there are gonna be some. Absolutely, you know, some of our customers did that. They built their own tooling and built their own algorithms to kind of monitor this and trigger it on its own. That does work. The only issue with that is usually when you're building an algorithm like that, you're on a set, you're on a set path, right? So you're either on the 50% of the 65 or the 80 and you can go in there and adjust it at any time to change but it's harder for an algorithm to see something like, you know, we had a spike, for example, we had a spike in November and December, right? And in January, that utilization is gonna drop significantly. However, the algorithm will see that as a spike on a projected path and automatically trigger a provisioning process for hardware that you may not need, right? But you'll understand your customers needs better than that and their usage patterns, right? So in a very large cloud, especially one that has workloads that deal with retail, an algorithm would have to have a lot more logic in it to understand the retail cycles, right?  So you can do that absolutely and we have some customers that did. You just have to keep in mind that one algorithm is not gonna suffice for every type of workload, every type of customer you have out there. It's there's still a human touch that's required, at least for now. I think at some point we will get to where we can model this better with just algorithms. So yes and no, right? I mean, if you hit, you know, there are logical limits to what these services can handle, right? We find them all the time, especially on the large scale clouds. And so we kind of know where that demarcation is where we have to say, okay, you've kind of hit, you've not hit the capacity, but you're about 20% off, so stop putting stuff in this cloud, right? And build another one or build another region and just keep going like that. Most of our customers have kept well below those just because their needs are more of scaled out clouds, having many of them as opposed to having one huge one or two huge ones or anything like that. So, but yes, if you start seeing performance problems or you understand where the limits are of performance for any of these services, that's absolutely a logical boundary where you can, you know you need to build another cloud. Yes and no, it depends. So we've got things like, for example, we've noticed that regions seem to hold together fairly well as they're, well this is a question slide, as they're approaching about 2,000 nodes, right? Now that's very, very anecdotal because, again, these are very homogenous clouds with, you know, similar if not identical hardware across all of them, right? And the workloads while they are varied are not dependent on certain things like CPU pinning for anything or, you know, heavy media encoding or decoding VoIP, anything like that. Those same rules do not apply. So we have customers that have heavy media encoding and decoding workloads and VoIP. They absolutely do not apply to them. Those limits are much lower in terms of the performance threshold where they have to break off into another cloud, right? So that's part of it. Cinder and Swift are also very subjective, right? So depending on what you're backing the service with. So usually, you know, Ceph does really well up to a certain point. But in terms of high performance, you know, bringing an all SSD back to Ray from, let's say, SolidFire or someone like that will get you further along in terms of speed and performance than Ceph will. And then of course, a lot of our large enterprise Fortune 500 customers are still trying to utilize sands in their environment, right? And those will get you so far, but those are limited in scale as well, right? So actually, in most cases, the limit of a sand will come way before the limit of the sender service, right? Yes, absolutely. So the answer is yes, right? So if you're running Neutron without DVR, and you're not using any kind of ML2 plugins for hardware offloading or anything like that, there's absolutely an upper threshold to that. I think that in most of our clouds, we found that approaching about 10 gigabit per second of throughput is kind of hitting the ceiling. Actually, we hit it before that, but getting close to it is hitting the ceiling for an x86 machine trying to act like a network device with real ASICs in it that are routing traffic or passing traffic through, right? Also, other things come into play that, you know, shared networks, right? Cause all kinds of problems if you use those, right? So trying to get your users to move on to only networks that are using floating IPs as opposed to shared networks where one tenant can affect the performance of another tenant, right? Those kind of things come into play. But I think that anything up to an approaching of 10 gigabit per second is okay. In general, we've been okay with that. But we did see problems as we approached it, at least with some of our customers, yeah. So it does, right? And that's kind of a, that's actually, it's good you brought that up. Although it's not part of this specifically, how you manage IP addresses in your cloud is critically important, right? And we typically, well, number one, we don't recommend that anybody take floating IPs and expose them directly to the internet. But the other thing is how you set up those IPs, right? So one of our recommendations in general is to take every cloud, no matter the size, and put it behind some time of layer three routing device, right? And the reason is because you then get full control of the network behind it and can do whatever you want behind there, right? So your only limitation will be if you're running either a double NAT scenario or however you're getting your traffic out to the internet, right? Not inside your corporate network because you fully control that. But if you're exposed to the internet at any point, your only limiting constraint is what you can get from your ISP in terms of publicly routable addresses, right? So that's important. And as you know, those are super limited at this point, right? So we do have costs, especially in the large, like telco segment where they have hundreds and thousands of these things, right? That are publicly routable addresses that they have to pay special attention to how they're doing that. But that's more of an education issue with users, right? Because, you know, AWS, if you have a lot of users who are coming from AWS, they've typically, at least prior to the last couple of years, have come with the conditioning that every instance had a public IP of some sort, right? Now VPC and all these other things came up where they got their private networks and they were able to not do that anymore. But the mentality never shook that a lot of these things should have public IPs. So you have users putting floating IPs on things that don't need them, right? So I think it's two things at once, right? Approaching it from managing those publicly routable IPs in a better manner and educating the users as to when to actually use a floating IP that maps to that or not, right? That's a better approach than just trying to, you know, only worry about the number and utilization without looking at why they're using them or how they're approaching that. Anything else? All right, thanks. Looks like we finished on time.


In my PhD research, I've been chasing ghosts. Now let's be clear, I'm a theatre scholar, not a ghost buster, but theatre is an ephemeral form. Each night plays are recreated live to win over the hearts and minds of a new group of people watching them in the theatre. They exist and then they're gone. I've been hunting New Zealand plays that have been performed internationally. I've been trying to make sense of the traces they've left behind to understand the significance of the journeys they've made. I've been burrowing through the archives, looking at reviews, images, scripts, chasing ghosts. But tonight, for one night only, these plays are coming back to life. With the help of these actors, we're going to examine how plays have represented our taroa to the world and how they've been received by the world in turn. This is finding ourselves. New Zealand theatres overseas experience live. Now, throughout this country's dramatic history, there's been a strong pull for New Zealand plays to be toured and produced internationally. With a relatively small population, there's an economic as well as artistic appeal to be seen by a potentially much larger audience in overseas destinations. Now, New Zealand's dramatic development has been defined by an identity crisis and this is especially true when New Zealand plays are produced overseas. Now, you might be asking at this point, what is New Zealand's most successful play internationally? Well, I have one possible answer for you and it might surprise you. The Rocky Horror Show. So, there's the statue of Rocky creator Richard O'Brien in Hamilton. This is where he spent his formative teenage years. Amongst the fishnet stocking and heels, can we capture O'Brien's coming of age hidden within the show? Brad and Janet can be seen as analogs of small-town New Zealanders who venture overseas where they can give themselves over to absolute pleasure and experience sensual dangers to treasure forever. Now, Rocky's New Zealand consciousness exists under the surface as an alternative narrative in reading. The thing itself can be said to be in a kind of cultural drag. OK, I've got another option for you. Ladies Night by Steven Sinclair and Kevin McCartney. Now, in this one, four kemi blows decide to form a strip act. It's being performed all over the world, but it's localised in each place it plays in, so kemi beef cake becomes joint-land muscle plots and so on in an endless line of a country-specific strippers. Ladies Night wears its cultural drag so convincingly that audiences would have no idea of its country of origin. Ben, stop pleading with the judges. OK, cut that. Here's another option, Skin Tight by Gary Henderson. It's the most produced New Zealand play where the New Zealand setting has been retained. So this is set amongst the South Canterbury plains. And in this play, rural battlers Tom and Elizabeth reflect on a life spent together and engage in these visceral physical fights as they negotiate their differing narratives. Oh! Did you know I had a lover? I thought not. No, come on. Tell me a flesh wound. Tom. Who was it? A sheerah. A sheerah? Well, what kind of sheerah? A sheep sheerah. How many kinds of sheerah are there? So Skin Tight has a number of cues and clues that the knowing local audience can identify and identify with. But then, national identity itself is a performance, a set of assumptions that become naturalised by a very active repetition. This is the feedback loop. The self-referential markers of identity that the ideal local knowing audience is meant to recognise as their own. Sheep sheerahs. It includes and it excludes and it resonates differently when placed outside of this country. Skin Tight does not change, but its audiences do. New Zealand and the world do see different things. Now let's travel back further into New Zealand's dramatic past. Before the 1970s, there were a few plays that actually represented New Zealand. Theatres privileged mostly British scripts and audiences dreamed of the Motherland. New Zealand drama was ready to be invented. A new group of New Zealand playwrights sent their scripts overseas. Now, one of these was Stella Jones, whose 1957 play The Tree, thank you, was first produced in Bristol, England. It was only once it gained this international legitimacy that it was actually performed in New Zealand. So in the tree, a young woman, Hilda, is eager to leave in New Zealand, which she sees as...  I'm going away. I won't stay any longer. But where? It doesn't matter. I don't know and I don't care. I'm going. No one can stop me. So an important aspect of New Zealand identity developed in the tree there is this pool felt by New Zealanders towards international travel and opportunities. So Jones was part of a nationalist movement of playwrights, most prominently Bruce Mason. Now, he toured his play The End of the Golden Weather to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1963, the same year that regular jet services between New Zealand and Britain began, which contributed to the concept of the New Zealanders' OE, where you go overseas to find yourself. Mason identified... A pricking sense of inferiority when we place ourselves beside the best that was thought, said, painted, and built in Europe. The argument that nothing we may have to say can make any possible impact on the world at large because we are so... insignificant. Now, Mason's End of the Golden Weather was the counterargument to this view. However, he was still driven by this need for cultural validation, for the old culture to prove it the new. There's a sense in order that you have an identity at first has to be recognised by others and possess this one. Now, this proves a problem when in order for the New Zealand play to be produced overseas, it's localised by the international company and the belief that this will make it more relevant to its audiences and therefore do better at the box office. Let's travel next to 1979. Now, this was when a New Zealand play opened in London's West End and stayed there for 18 months. This was middle-aged spread by prolific New Zealand playwright Roger Hall. New Zealand, this was greeted as a breakthrough work. It concerns itself with infidelity in the Wellington suburbs and a fair taking place between a deputy school principal and a relief teacher. However, in London's West End, the New Zealand play was produced and performed, adapted in cultural British drag. Let's look first at the New Zealand version. Judy and Colin, who are having the affair, discussed their desire for travel. We're going to go overseas. I've decided and I'm saving up after going, just as soon as I've got enough. Well, note there the similarity between Hilda's line with the tree and that one with Judy. Well, I keep going, you guys are doing really well. You're open asian. You're going to do what Karoza did in the book, go around everywhere by train? I've never been. Well, anywhere. By the time I've taken four years to get my degree and done some teaching, doing some money, I was married when Jane was born. God. Is that the time? Compare this with how travel is situated in the British edition? Oh, God. We're not off on our travel rem in Mrs Owe. Nine days here one year. I thought about there the next. Grab two more on another Spanish steps and getting on to undy stolen and group getting grounds. I'm Judy. Are you another who's done the grab tour on the instalment plan? It's where I met Robert, actually. So, for the New Zealanders, travel here is a big deal. New Zealand Judy has never left the country which speaks to her great desire to get out. In Britain, it's just across the channel. The stakes are lower. So, middle-aged spread is a commercial cultural adaptation with a colonial premise. The British centre is privileged over a commercially and culturally inferior New Zealand. Let's go now to 2015. And a player was actually able to experience live. Generation of Z. Now, this is a immersive zombie show and I experienced this four times during its run in London. I think we've just got one of the characters there from the play coming out here. Now, this is a product of globalisation and it rejected New Zealand locality in an attempt to enter an international paradise where an endless horde of zombie fans can get this guy under control. In its own way, it repeats the cultural adaptation of ladies night and middle-aged spread. It shows theatre makers with a global outlook no longer needing to make New Zealand plays in order to have their culture affirmed. But, New Zealand Aotearoa with its increasingly diverse identities does have important stories and histories to tell. I have found that audiences find ways to relate regardless and actively search for markers of cultural equivalence. Settings don't need to be changed. They need to have a skin tight. So, after chasing New Zealand theatre's ghosts and being chased by New Zealand theatre zombies I've come to my conclusion. There is value in promoting works with markers of New Zealand, Aotearoa lest the globalised zombies completely take over. Tonight we've travelled with several New Zealand works, some that look very different on overseas stages. Some markers travel some remain at home. These are the stories of New Zealand and New Zealand's OE and identity crisis and the struggles of making it internationally. And so we close the plays for now until they live again. Thanks for letting us play. Thank you very much for that. Questions? Thank you for that super entertaining presentation. I was just wondering about your methodology and the kind of critical framework that you've used to contextualise this study. Yes, so a lot of my research has involved going into the archives and looking at what's actually been kept. Luckily New Zealand's history has actually been pretty well documented. So I was able to go to the Hocken in Otago and there's the folders for Roger Hall and playwrights like Robert Lord. So I'm taking that because as I said there's only these traces that are left behind. I kind of have to interpret through it what the live experience was for the audiences and the different destinations watching these plays. So reviews are an important record and it provides some of the possible responses that the productions open up. I do look at some different theories so we are interested in post-colonial theory, we're interested in global hybridity or these sorts of things. So that's how I'm able to pull it together and hopefully evoke what the actual experience of these plays were like at the time. Thank you again, it was really enjoyable. Did you find anything further back beyond 1950? Did you find any evidence of say even early New Zealand, Victorian sort of talking back to the, you know, how do we answering back to the Empire? Yes, so there's a few cases on way, way back. So there's one in the late 1800s which toured to Australia and one of its big set pieces was the pink and white terraces eruption so they had this huge spectacle about that. But then after that early 1900s there was this play called The Wind and the Rain and that actually played in the West End for three years and it was also produced in America and was wildly popular so that was by a again a New Zealand playwright who lived in the country, was brought up here and then he went to Britain to seek his fortune and so he wrote a play about postdoctoral students in Edinburgh which was, you could kind of say was influenced by his own time in Dunedin which obviously has some interesting intersections with Scottish history there so there's these kind of bizarre cases which is like can we really claim this in New Zealand's history so when that kind of has been spoken in the canon they say it's the New Zealand play that got away it's the New Zealand play by proxy but again there's this kind of is a psychic link that if you want to read it in there you can. Who's that playwright put you on the spot? Hodge Thank you very much Very enjoyable I hope he's alright You mentioned a quite an important point is we need to talk about box office and a lot of the all this comes back down to money as I say you want to make it as markable as possible and it does put a bit of pressure on the people doing the preparing these performances and sending them overseas what do you feel in a way having looked at the research do you feel that there is among the contemporaries a kind of pressure that they do conform or are they pushing back against it do you see it more wanting to push that New Zealand experience more because we don't want to like this is brown boys because that's completely British but it does work here I know the links so I feel that experience can work but what's your opinion with that Creative New Zealand who do a lot of the funding for theatre they have a policy which is actively interested in showcasing New Zealand works overseas so they have been doing a lot of work in that area in terms of touring it but this is the sanctioned view of what New Zealand identity is so the shows that they choose to promote overseas so there's ones that go through there and then there's kind of the independence so there is a movement of theatre makers who aren't interested in these national issues anymore they do want to make these global stories so you've got the government push on one hand versus other theatre makers who are rejecting this so a few years ago they supported the New Zealand at Edinburgh season so this was a big push to the Edinburgh fringe to get New Zealand work out and this did kind of reflect a New Zealand Pacifica identity overseas but that isn't actually reflected in the range of works that we see in the mainstream theatres inside the country so that's also a problem as well in terms of there's kind of one thing for overseas and then another thing that's not happening enough within New Zealand We should probably think of that time but do you think that there is I'm thinking about the fringe having a relative experience with the fringe do you think it is more acceptable now to be overtly New Zealand and I was there the first flight of the Concord's performance of the fringe then in some ways then it is to be overtly New Zealand in New Zealand like we've now created an identity so we can actually really sell ourselves and get those plays as seen as somehow cliched or a bit pasai here are you seeing that transition in New Zealand identity? Well sometimes it's the opposite reaction so one of the interesting cases for the Enbra fringe with that New Zealand season was one of the big shows that they push was The Factory which was considered the first Pacifica musical and so in New Zealand this was a huge deal in terms of identity and in terms of genre but then when it was presented overseas it didn't do very well at all so it was presenting a new take on the story they kind of saw it as like an old fashioned musical so there are still these kinds of problems of translation in terms of what we see as something that's really new and exciting and then it goes over and it doesn't get the same sort of response Thank you very much James for that Brilliant