Good morning. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech on a given morning during the coronavirus crisis and we have for what do you want to call it, moral, spiritual support with us today, Rabbi Ijil Krasenjansky here on Community Matters. Welcome to the show, Rabbi. So nice to see you. Thank you, Jay. It's nice to talk to you as always in this new setting as well. Yeah, we're doing pretty much all our guests are coming on by remote. If CNN and MSNBC can do it, we can do it. In fact, I think they may have learned it from us. Anyway, so Rabbi, things must have changed for Chabad and for the Jewish community over the past few weeks with the shelter in and the rule against gatherings. And I would like to ask you about that. It must have a profound effect because one of the things about the Jewish people and Judaism and certainly the Jewish religious experiences, you get together with people. You are close.  And here you can't really do that. So what's happening? Well, good question. We adapt as needed. But philosophically, for a moment before I get to the pragmatic is that Judaism, while there's a great emphasis on, like you mentioned, gatherings, especially like Passover, which is coming up, the Seder is the time when family and extended family and friends come together and gather. And there's actually the expression in the Talmud, that the beauty for the king is in the presence of multitudes. The more people come together, the greater the, not only the event, but the celebration and the glory for Hashem, for God. However, interestingly enough, while Judaism places this emphasis on, you know, on public prayer, as we all know, cannot be done unless you have a minion. You mean communal prayer cannot be done unless you have a quorum of 10 people. Otherwise, you can't say the Qadish prayer or prayers like that. So there is that public aspect of Jewish observance. However, what's interesting is there's another aspect in Judaism, which is the personal and the individual. When God came down on Mount Sinai, where it all began and gave us the Ten Commandments, the first words out of God's mouth were, I am the Lord, your God, who has taken you out of the land of Egypt. And as the commentaries point out, your God in the singular, in Hebrew, the words that is used is the singular expression. Even though God was talking to millions of people, all the Jewish people at the time, nevertheless, God uses the singular because Judaism is a very personal relationship with God. All of the commandments are there to awaken within us the personal core spark. And so therefore, when we are in a situation like today, when we cannot come together in prayer or in celebration, so now by default, we fall back on the personal track, the interpersonal emphasis in Judaism. Man, in general, is a social being by design. That's how God created us. We cannot live on an island all to ourselves. Even if we're lucky to live on this island, we share it with many millions, with over a million people as tourists. However, even though there is that aspect within us that seeks to relate to other people and connect to other people, there's also the individual in his own world, the personal, the true you that's not visible to the outside world that resides within you. As we all know that within us, our personality, we all have a soul, and the soul is the spark of life within us. We all have a godly soul, which is innately godly and good. And successful living is actually being in touch with who we are on the deepest levels. And a lot of Judaism is about becoming aware of that and giving us the tools how we can be in touch with ourselves, to know ourselves. And even though it sounds very simplistic, but I once read that they once did a study and they asked people to describe themselves and define themselves and had all these different multiple choices. And the interesting thing was most people describe themselves so differently than how other people knew them. So being in touch with yourself and allowing for your inner self to color your whole being and to express itself involves a lot of work on the self, personal introspection. And Pesach, while normally it is celebrated, like we said before, with family and it's a fun time and it's a joyous time. It's a time of celebration. We commemorate our history and the miracles of that took place in the past. But on a deeper level, when we are alone and reflecting these ideas, it's a lot more powerful. And as a matter of fact, in the mystical teachings of the Torah, in the Hasidic writings, you find a very interesting explanation about the whole idea of the exodus of Egypt. Passover is celebrated because we commemorate how our ancestors left Egypt several thousand years ago and we gained freedom. And we say in the Haggoda, that's the storybook of Pesach that we use at the Seder, that in every generation, a person has to envision as if they themselves are going out of Egypt. It's not just commemorating history, something that took place way back when, but we have to find relevance in the story and apply it to our own lives. So in the mystical teachings, in the Hasidic as explained, the Hebrew word for Egypt is mitzrayim, which in Hebrew also means boundaries, limitations. And every single person is confined by different limitations, weaknesses, challenges, obstacles, and difficulties. And the idea of going out of Egypt is the ability and the work to transcend these limitations and to be able to rise above them. And that's why the exodus of Egypt is such a relevant story. In fact, the Torah tells us that every day we have to remember our exodus of Egypt, because the definition of life is being able, finding the inner strength and the inner ability to be able to overcome obstacles. Most of the obstacles and the most difficult obstacles we look to overcome are not the external ones that are imposed to us by external circumstances, but the inner ones. The ones, the character flaws and or every person's inner work is different. But the ultimate goal in successful living and fully living is to be able to rise above them and to be able to transcend them. So Pesach has a very, Pesach was a very relevant holiday and celebrating it alone actually gives us the opportunity to look at these ideas and to reflect upon them. Well, unpacking that a little bit, one thing I wanted to mention is that in the in the service, the prayer service, there's a thing called the silent Amida, which where you you pray to God yourself silently, you don't make a sound. And in my in my upbringing as a conservative Jew, I could read out of the prayer book or not. I could just think too, I could commune with God, if I liked, or I could read out of the prayer book. Anyway, bottom line is what you're saying and what that prayer is saying is that every individual person has a direct connection with God, if he chooses. And this is very important because it's just a flip side of the notion of minion and gathering. As you can do it, maybe you should do it yourself, you should have a sort of, you know, a two pronged approach to it. One is you should be with your members of the community with the minion or larger for every single festival, every single activity. You're with a lot of people and you're close to them, sharing it with them. And sometimes you're all by yourself and it's just you and him or her. So it's very interesting that you know that you have on that. It's paradoxical. Yes, it is. But it's okay. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. The other thing is, you know, Passover is very interesting. The Passover, you know, traditionally it's, you know, it's the Seder and people get together. It's not a minion. It may not be as big as a minion, but it's a family anyway. And it's, you know, several people together all going through the rituals that have existed for thousands of years and reinforcing, retelling the story out of the Haggadah and all that. But what you just said really is very interesting is because you can have a Seder without inviting anyone to your home. You can have a Seder essentially alone and you can use the silent communication or the personal, I should say, the personal communication with God as part of that Seder. So Judaism is flexible in this way, isn't it?  I guess, I guess the problem is that not everybody, not every rabbi feels the way you do. There are super orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem, for example, who are in contention with the police because, you know, the rule in Israel is don't have gatherings and they want to have a gathering anyway. They have a minion all the time and and it's a little cat and mouse game where the police are trying to find the minion and separate them for purposes of dealing with the coronavirus. It's very interesting. I think that actually if that is the case, it is a minority, a very small minority. Most Jewish people, most observant Jewish people, most orthodox or ultra orthodox, whatever label you want to give them are actually very, very careful and cautious and all the synagogues are closed down now. We just know communal prayers and most of the communal celebrations in Jewish life has taken on a whole new form. And as it should be, as it must be, to, you know, the Torah gives the highest priority to preserving life and to help and to watch one's health. And this is apparently how God wants us to celebrate now. The question is what is the message behind it? What is God telling us? I once heard it explained like with an analogy in that there was a dad or a parent once took out their child at night and pointed to the heavens, the young child pointed to the heavens to show, wanting to show them the majesty of the stars in the sky at night. So beautiful. But the little kid being very, very young, just focused on the finger, looked at the dad's finger or the mother's finger, not realizing that the finger was pointing heavenward. And we are like that many times, we are like that little child that God is pointing, but we are fixated on the finger on the, on what's not realizing that he's pointing to something. So it's clear that God is, as we say, you know, God is always communicating with us. He communicates to us by everything that happens in our lives. But that's normally that subtle. And you have to pay close attention to pick up on what God is telling us. But sometimes God is banging on our door so loud that we have, that we have no other choice but to stop and to ask who's there and what's going on. So I think these are one of those times. And, you know, it would require, you know, someone a much greater stature than me to be able to interpret and understand exactly the messages. But I think that a couple of messages are very, very clear. And one of them is what we talked about is that each and every one of us as a lonely individual is really critical to God's master plan. You know, there are certain societies where the focus is on the collective and there's no individual rights. No individual's needs are, or an individual's needs are hardly taken into consideration. There are many societies that are protected that way. Then we have, for example, in our country where it's almost the opposite, where the individual rights trump the public's right, the public's good. Within Judaism, both are equally important. One does not overshadow the other or one does not uproot the other. So, you know, now that we're all forced to quarantine and to stay at home, first of all, in Judaism, the home has always been the epicenter of Judaism, not the synagogue, not the house of worship. It was the Jewish home that is really the secret of our survival throughout the generations. And it all happened in the home. And who we truly, truly are is really only in the home. Outside we wear a mask, right? Today we're wearing masks. How about you, Rabbi? You have a beard. An N95 is hardly going to fit around your beard. What do you do for that? I read that there are people who make tailored masks for people with beards. Are you using one? Well, so far the masks that I use are off the shelf, run-of-the-mill masks, but they seem to work. The other thing of interest is Chabad has changed its regular, you know, Passover experience. Traditionally, Chabad has a big Seder. Invite people, including tourists, who come around and you have a, you know, 50, 600 people come down to the synagogue to pray together on Passover, but really can't do that this year. You have an alternative technique. Can you talk about it? Yeah. So correct. Chabad is known worldwide for the public gatherings that we have on Passover night. The Seder is celebrated with the community and like for us in Hawaii with many tourists and a typical Seder, we can have 150, 250, even more people. But this year, none of that is happening in other places around the world. Like, believe it or not, I think the largest public Seder that Chabad has is in Thailand, where they have a Seder for over 3,000 backpackers who are traveling in many, many Israelis, those other people. But none of that is happening this year. It's prohibited, forbidden to be in large gatherings. It's dangerous. So everyone is going to celebrate Pesach at home, Passover at home, make a Seder. If this family together, husband and wife, parents and children, or close friends will celebrate it together, very different than as it's been done traditionally for many years. But let me share a joke with you. We need some levity. Exactly. We need some levity these days. Yeah. By the way, someone sent me an interesting joke which read that how interesting that Passover is being canceled because of a plague. That's very interesting. And to those who didn't get it, the whole Passover, we commemorate the plagues that God brought about to the Egyptians and now because of a plague, we have to, actually it's not canceled. But so this is a joke. The joke is that a couple of scientists were experimenting and tinkering with some, with nuclear fusion in the North Pole and something went terribly wrong and there was a mass, mass explosion. And the heat was like beyond off the charts. And they calculated and they calculated that within 30 days the whole world will be submerged under water because all of the ice would melt because of this heat, this action. So they immediately sent words to all the governments around the world and all the religious leaders to tell them of what happened and according to their calculation, it's another 30 days and then it's all over. So all of the religious leaders gathered their people and spoke to them and said, we've all heard this terrible news. We need to now repent because we're going to be facing our maker very soon and we'll have to come to God clean to go home and repent and ask God's forgiveness. That was basically the message that they were all giving to their adherents. And then the rabbis, one big rabbi gathered all the Jews together and said, okay, my boy chicks, my fellow brethren and sisters, we all heard the terrible news and now we have 30 days to learn how to survive under water. It's got to be flexible. Right. Well, that takes me to something I think we, so are you not finished? No, what I was going to say is, you know, we're joking. And like you say, we need to have some levity here, but it's a very frightening time and our prayers go out to those who are... Let's talk about New York. You have family in New York. You have friends in New York. The Chabad headquarters is in New York and Brooklyn. And I wonder, you must be in touch with people. What are you hearing from the Jewish community, the Orthodox Jewish community in New York? What I'm hearing is so frightening that it's like surreal. You have to scratch your head and say, is this really happening? Firstly, the virus of this spread almost everyone is affected. One in two people are probably affected by the virus. Thank God many, many, many people are asymptomatic and they don't have symptoms, but there are many people that do have symptoms and many people are in the hospitals fighting for their lives. We know in the Chabad community in New York, every day there are funerals, people passing away from the virus. Mostly older people, because when they get it, they don't have the immune system to fight it, but also young people are struggling with it and some have succumbed and passed away. So it's really, really, really unbelievable, frightening, and there's another problem.  What are you hearing about that? What are they saying? This is like the issue in the Holocaust. Does God want this to happen? Why doesn't God stop this from happening? It seems all so terrible, and how do you rationalize that with the Jewish approach to things? So that's a timeless question that has been around for all time. The question of how can God allow for suffering in this world? Two things. If God is indeed good, we believe God is absolutely good, and B, if God controls everything in this world, which we believe that God does, how can this happen? And we find, as our commentaries say, that Moses himself, Moshe Rabbeinu, our first Jewish leader, who took us out of Egypt and brought down the tablets from Mount Sinai, gave us the Torah, himself grapples with that question. Why do good things happen to bad people? Why is there suffering in the world? And we all know the Book of Job from the Old Testament, who suffered greatly. And when his friends came to comfort him and hinted that he must have done something wrong to invite God's wrath in the way it happened in his life, he rejected that because he was a good man, he was a righteous person, and he rejected the thinking that suffering is a result of his punishment. So the bottom line answer, the way I understand it, as it's explained in the Torah, and as I believe as every believing Jew accepts, is that there are many, many things that are beyond our comprehension. Our intellect can only go so far, can only understand so much. And if we think about it, and we recognize that we, as individuals, are only a teeny speck in the cosmos, in the galaxies, in all the world where it's like an infantismal speck in this whole being. So the fact that we don't understand that our finite brains cannot comprehend and it doesn't compute, that's not such a surprising thing. The surprising thing is that God gave us a mind and there's so much that we could understand with our minds. But the fact that our minds can only go so far and not further, that is something that, that is something that if you think about it, one could accept, one could understand. So an answer to your question is we don't know. Well, here we are, we're almost at the end of our time, Rabbi, and I wanted to ask you one last question. You know, here we are at Passover, the night of the first Satyr is later this week.  How are you going to celebrate Passover when early as in a group? It's, but this time not, how are you going to do, how is Chabad going to do that? And remember these great lessons. So for ourselves, we're going to celebrate myself and Pearl, my wife and our youngest son is home. Usually you pass over our children and grandchildren to spend the holiday with us, but this year they're not. We're probably going to have one or two guests in our house and keep social distancing. And as we said all along, you know, you know, what's interesting is that the first Passover when the Jews left Egypt, God told them to be quarantined in their homes. They were not to go out of their homes that night because that was the night when God showed the birth of the Egyptians, which precipitated their exodus from Egypt. So this year, we're celebrating Passover as it was celebrated the first year, the first Passover. Everyone quarantined in their home. Now, now what's interesting is that Judaism teaches us that there's an end game to all of this. We don't just pass through this world, born and pass away, and that's the end of it, but God has a plan for this world. And the plan was for us human beings to fix this world and elevate this world and refine this world by living elevated and refined lives. And the end of the journey is the coming of the Messiah, when the world will finally, where Mashiach the Messiah will usher in the perfected state, the potential that we each have that's embedded in each and every one of us that at this right now we are hardly accessing. When Mashiach comes, the world will flourish and each and every one of us will explode. The latent powers and strengths and good that we have within each and every one of us will explode. And that is the end game. And that is the sum total and the result of all of the good deeds that each and every one of us do every single day. So the big rabbis have said for a long time that we are now in the end of times or the end of days. And in Judaism, the end of days is not something cataclysmic in the negative, but it's something very powerful and positive. And the feeling is that we're there. We're on the threshold of the redemption, which is what Passover celebrates. It's not just a commemoration of a redemption that took place in the past, but it is the prayer that the complete and final redemption should come to pass in our lifetime. So we're there. And we should do good things. We should be good and make mitzvah, so to speak, to everybody around us. And that means thinking in the larger sense for the benefit of everyone. Well, thank you so much, Rabbi. It's always great to talk to you. I want to talk to you again as the crisis goes forward and have your words of encouragement and spiritual light. Thank you so much. Rabbi Itchel Kresenjanski, the Rabbi of Chabad of Hawaii. Thank you, Jay. It's a pleasure. I always just want to say that Passover, you didn't even mention is this Wednesday night? It begins. It's an eight day celebration. And even though we're not having a public satyr at Chabad, but we have Passover kits to go. So anyone who is in need of anything Passover, like Jay, we're going to bring you some matzah later. Please call us. Go visit us on our website or call us at the office<PHONE_NUMBER>. And we'll be more than happy to help out in whichever way we can. God bless and have a happy Passover. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Rabbi. Aloha. Shalom.


Welcome to Reader Syndicate 3.0, the next evolution of the look into counterculture that is Canada. My name is Matthew, owner of Riot Seeds, and this started as a one-man mission for strain history and breeding science. Over time, it's evolved into something bigger, better, and more of a team effort. We will be joined by members of the Cannaluminati and other friends throughout the season to hear their takes on grow techniques, breeding science, strain history, and more. Our mission is to combat the narrative that corporate cannabis and seed posers are obfuscating for their own financial benefit. Welcome to the Underground. We are The Syndicate. Do you have any experience with Uptown Hayes, Piff? Uh, NL5 Hayes. Yeah.  They're, I strongly believe they're all just NL5 Hayes, just renamed. There was a lot of them that he stole. Right, and I just did work, I just made a cross with one of my lemon trees. I made some Fem seeds with the lemon tree of mine and processed it.  It's good, you know, the Piffs, all those NL5s are fucking, all those NL5 Hayes, they're dominant when you cross them. The time I played around with them, they've always taken over. Good stuff, you know, in the past, I wasn't much of a fan of those. They just kind of made my head spin a little too much. But now, like, I've been smoking them more and more and enjoying them more and more. You know, I'm getting older, so my body's changing and whatnot. For sure.  See, I just did those lemon tree Piffs, and they grow like the Piff, tall, and then the flavors have been ranged from lemon tree to the Piff and everything in between, you know. What was your sourcing for the Piff? Cuban Black Hayes, I got the Cuban Black Hayes, and then my buddy said they came from one of the phone guys. What do you say? Not Darkheart, Purple City genetics is where my buddy got the Piff. He gave me a couple. He gave me that one and a different one from that Piff Coast guy, something three Piff Coast three, I don't remember, but I like the Cuban Black a little bit better. So you mentioned lemon tree. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. What do you say? So when I was growing those two Hayes out, the other one from Piff Coast, the number three, looked hella good, hella frosty, finished earlier, but in my climate it got powdery mildew, a little too formal. So I decided to stay against that, you know. I like easy growing plants.  That's what I'm always going after.  So most of my strains that I work with, that's what they are. Yeah. So CSI specifically wanted me to ask you about lemon tree. I knew one of the lemon tree brokers in the bay. Young guy, anyhow. He pretty much branded lemon tree and another one. And every time he'd buy packs, he would find seeds inside of him. So he ended up giving me about a hundred seeds, a little bit more of the... So they're essentially lemon tree, hermy seeds. The actual clone, south seeds here and there. So I grew out all the seeds. Some of them popped out looking like sour diesel, even kind of smelling like sour diesel. And then the rest were short, different degrees of shortness, different degrees of that, that terp. You know, everybody says lemon tree, lemony. But to me, it's... I smell California orange. I don't know. So to me, it's more orangey, but I don't know what you want to call those terps. So yeah, I picked out the best citrus. Yeah, strong citrus. Grew all the seeds out. I ended up with seven that I picked out. And then from those seven came down to three of them. And then from those three, I kept the one. And then I gave the guiding me the seeds, all the cuts. And then he ended up giving them out to a couple of people, like that Grand Flora mark or whatever. Oh yeah, Grand Flora. Yeah, so he used one of those cuts to make his melanade. What did I have? I had a two, four. I kept the two, four and a... I don't remember. They all kept the one that was the easiest to grow, that had really good terps. And that's what the Grand Flora guy used. The one that I ended up keeping was a little bit harder. It was definitely finicky with the over watering. But it had more of terps than the other ones. It was just a little bit more finicky to grow. So I think that's why the other guys never really went with it. Yeah, so not much to tell about that. Hermes seeds, grew them all out, and then started back crossing, back crossing and back crossing. And of course, I stress out everything, just to make sure they don't harm on me. Over again, until they're right. With the lemon tree, have you ever tried the Oregon lemon diesel prior to the lemon tree? I haven't, I haven't. I always wondered when different people try the lemon tree, if they see any relation to it. It's interesting that you see so much diesel in it too, because that story is always kind of stuck with it. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people, especially guys from Oregon always say the lemon tree is just that, that Oregon lemon diesel renames. But you're very well could be, you know. Have you tried lemon jeep? Yeah, yeah. What did you think of that, comparatively? Tall, easy grown plant. I don't know, I'd rather grow a calio. Maybe it is calio. You know, calio, like, it just tasted good, smelled good, but there wasn't, you know, lemon jeep. Yeah, lemon jeep is pretty similar to that. The lemon tree is by far the best, citrusy, ganja plant that I've come across. I don't know, like it's got the flavor, and it's got a good buzz to it. And I mean, of course, it's one of the strains, like if I smoke it for two or three days, it's not getting me that high anymore. But the first few days, it's great, it tastes great. Because actually, I'm smoking some lemon tree G33 right now. How is it? It's delicious. So I made a bunch of them, and I ended up growing them all out myself this year, and picked out a few. I've been doing the little smoke testers for a couple of days, but grow like the gelato, look like gelato, but have straight, sippy, raspberry cane flavor. Oh, nice. Yeah, total improvement on both, I think, on both strains. Right, and that's like the ultimate goal of the very area, you know. Improve something structure-wise, flavor-wise, pothose-wise. There's always a reason why I'm doing something, right?  There's always some kind of madness behind the thought. It's either, you know, with the lemon tree reversals that I did, I picked out easy, tall, fast-growing plants to cross the lemon tree, because the lemon tree is short and squat, right? Yep, yep. So I wanted a tall, fast-growing, lemon tree flavor, but stony. So everything I picked out, like the Blue Dream or the Biff and gelato, I also did a GMO, but I've worked the GMO a couple of times. It seems like it spits out a lot of Hermes on me with every cross done with it.  Blue Dream, I know a lot of people hate it, but it's still like, I love it, too. I love the high of Blue Dream, dude, like the high, the taste, the smell, all of it. Yeah, it's great.  Yeah, absolutely.  Like they just complemented the other perfectly. Always. That's cool. So, a lot of people don't know, and I don't know how much you want to talk about this in detail, but a lot of us that received Kim91 later on, oh, oh, you did a gratitude for it, even reaching our hands. There's a lot of people within that. Are you open to talk about that? About which one? Kim91? Kim91. I got that from Jason Skunkpie. He was at my neighbor's house in Willets over there, and then I just, I went over there and we started talking. And I know, I remember not so dog at one of the harvest parties, early 2000s, raving about Kim91. Kim91, right? Him and a couple other people of his crew, right? Yeah. Oh, you guys don't even know. And it fucking, you know, it built up the meals.  I did. That, you know, I heard it from them for a while. And then one day, yeah, I was at my neighbor's house and Skunkpie's over there, and we started yapping and chatting. He was like, dude, I got the Kim91.  So I knew he was legit because he knew all the same people and like where he came from and everything.  You kick down the cut. I'm, you know, make seeds and I'll give you every direction. So I ended up taking that Kim91 to back cross three. And then what did I get? I got the, and then the chem fours and all that, the chem one, two, three, whatever came out. And Caleb hooked me up with all of those. Spectre gave me all of those and I grew all those out.  Flavor wise. Same. The rest are, they're good. Like the, the chem 91 to me is, is very OG, OG to me. Flavor wise. But, you know, SFV to me was way, way, way better. Infinitely. And easier to grow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that chem nine nose was Halifniki.   So yeah, that was the, the chem 91 came from him. And then I gave it to Caleb and the rest is history from that, you know. So Bubba Cush, Bubba, Bubba, Bubba Cush. What's, what's this, the back sourcing story on that? Like, again, a lot of us. So I did a gratitude for you for us even having Bubba. Bubba, I got from another glass blower, a Bishop, really talented glass blower. And he got it. He, I remember him saying he got it from this guy that would, all I remember it was like, he would just pack fat bowls, take one hit and then spit out the bowl. It could be organ kid is, is what it sounds like to me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he gave me the cut in 99, I think it was. Okay. He gave me a cut of that. And yeah, from, from that is just, you know, I passed it around to random folks here and there. Caleb, you guys on the old forums back in the day, Fletch, you know, and that's how I met Fletch for the second time and one came really good friends after that. Yeah. Most of it, most of all these things came from back in the day with the glass blowing community. That's great. There were Trinity, you know, what's that? Trinity, Trinity, I got from Caleb. Okay. And I've grown that out a couple of times and I've made a bunch of crosses.  Right? It comes out with all different kinds of flavors and looks, growth structures. Oh, you know what?  Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So I dug through that and there was some weird fun stuff that Cam 91, like some full on Indica plants popping up, some real short, squatty, like Pakistani kind of looking leaves, not so thick and wide, but more slender. Yeah. So there was some interesting stuff in there, but I never came across one that had that gas in there. I remember they were a little bit different. Yeah. You did his favorite run of sour diesel flower. And I think he said you use power flower nudes, flower power? Flower power. Yeah. It was a dirt brand. It was a bag of dirt and the guy that made that was up in Trinity County. That's a funny story.   Right? Yeah. And it was all the rage back in the early 2000s. And there was no pearlite or anything.  The sour diesel that I was talking about is I had a house in the Sunset District in San Francisco. And these houses are built to grow in. The meter, so the garages are all tandem style, right?  And then some people, the meter, the PG&E guys would have to come in and like look through a little window for the meter. So they weren't able actually to get to the meter.   Right? Right? So I was growing sour in this house. And next door, I had a grower to the left of me. And so the right of me was like maybe a brothel house or something like that. So sometimes the place will get stunky.  So powdery mildew was the thing. So I'd always have to turn it on the sulfur burners. And when I would turn them on, I would just put it on a timer and leave. And then come back eight hours later, right? Yeah. But every time I would come back, the people in the store in the brothel place, like they would be all in the driveway and spitting on my driveway and flicking their cigarettes. It must have made the place stink pretty bad. One day the other grower came over and he was like, bro, there's these things called carbon scrubbers filters.  So the sour though, what I found is you're going to lose a lot of your yield.  You get super dense and crazy, crazy frosty.  But the yields, you lose a lot of yield. Tons of yield. Yeah. It gets lost on that.  I always went after the best possible smoke, right? So yield was the last thing on my mind. Turbs first? Yeah. Yeah. That's where that sour came from. Powerflower and age old is what I used back then. That's good. That's good advice, man. So root bound power. Well, you can't get power flower now obviously. They ended that story. Do you mind telling it? What happened to the bog? To the what? Oh, the bog guy.  It was like an ancient like redwood forest bed, wasn't it? Something like that?     So one of my, one of the things that I'm most fascinated with that you've worked with that I've never, I've never even grown a cut of it. I've only grown hybrids because it's not widely passed or you know, is the purple indica. What can you tell us about that? Another one comes from archive. He forced it up in Seattle area. Short, stout, grapey, molded, helly easy. I don't know. I've seen it. I've seen it floating around Northern California, but they called it purple kish back then. Yeah. Right. And then what else? It had another name to it. Ultra violet. I think they might have called it. And the PNW was another. Yeah. There's been a bunch. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I got that from Fletch and besides that, I have no idea of the history behind it. Short little indica plant. I just remember the mold. It would mold so easy. It was like the first thing to mold on me. That's gnarly. Beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful plant. You know. How is the smoke from it? That's the one thing I don't know for you. Oh shoot. It's been so long. Grape-ish. Not like her called grape, but grape-y, skunky to it. It's like an old school purple afi. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just old school purple afghani. Most like broadleaf, short, big, big, like arm-sized buds on it.  I've always just wondered why, like, what was, what was the reason that it remained so locked, other than just mystery, you know? I'm just always thinking. If that, like Albert Walker and the Malawi, all those floated around the Washington area quite a bit.  Those, like, they're, they're, they're, they're jam-o. They're, what, more the steve, as I remember back then, they're like a lot of the steve plants. So, every region has their own time, what, this year, last year, you know, L.A. in early 2000s with OG, you know, areas with purple or full, you know, about every 10 years it seems like the trend kind of changes to something else. Yeah. Have you noticed that most people lost their OG cuts? Do you get hit up about that a lot? No. No, I'm, I'm so out of the loop, dude. I don't, I'm getting old. I don't talk to nobody. I don't buy weed from anybody. Like, I don't even know how much weed goes. I don't even know the prices anymore. Yeah, I don't. I have no clue. Yeah. The one, the one thing I've been hearing a lot is I've been getting tons of DMs from other seed makers and shit. No one kept OG cuts. No one. So, I have a feeling your, your OG seed, seed sales are going to skyrocket soon because it's heavily in demand and no one kept them. Right. I noticed that they has been doing a little bit better than the other strength so far. I see a lot of people are going back to ours as well. Yeah, absolutely. It seemed like it's making, so the gas is coming back, right?  I mean, it's the most beautiful I've ever seen it. Absolutely. But it's just not much to it, you know, it all looks the same now. They all, they don't really have the turps that I'm looking for. And like, OG is still my favorite. That's my go to the gas, OG's. Hard to beat, man. That flavor, the lip smacking flavor. The flavor and the fact is just like, it just never disappoints. It always, it always works. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I wanted to ask about one, a couple of things. So one, I've heard you mentioned recently, it's called the PC3 and it's an NL5 haze. Okay, yeah, the PC3. The PC3 was that one from Piftos. Gotcha. And like I was saying, that's the, I grew it side by side with the Cuban black cut. And that PC3 looked incredible, had the flavor, had that deep haze flavor. Finished, finished earlier than the Cuban black. But for me and my climate, like it just, it got powdery mildew a little, a little too easy. So that's why I didn't stick with it.  So I kind of get away from plants that get it super easy or plants that mold, hell easier, whatnot. And there was some Blockhead and Lovecandy. What was your favorite expressions to come out of that? So Lovecandy, Blockhead and Lovecandy are the same. Okay. I asked reader Steve, I was like, Hey man, you know, I've been working the strain. Are you cool if I release it?  It's like, oh yeah. Lovecandy it is. That was my cash proper in the late 90s, early 2000s. Kush Cleaner ended up replacing that Blockhead for me. But back then outdoor, it finished early and it had the look. It had that almost an indoor look where actually a lot of people were passing it off as indoor. Like a melon, like a cantaloupe, melon, I don't know, typical spice of life flavors.  So like I said, it was my cashcropper for days. I worked that one heavily. I back crossed it a couple of times and then I lost the clone. And then buddy mine, Kendo, he used to go online by Kendo. He still had it and he ended up passing it all throughout Oregon. And then he brought it back to me. I back crossed it another time. And then I don't remember what happened. I lost the cut. And then from there I started going F1, F2, F3 with it. But like cashcropper again early, like every seed comes out identical. There's no variation. That's the ultimate, right? Like for me anyways, like if I really something, I want it to be uniform. Right, that was my goal for outdoors. Like I wanted to grow 100 seeds of one variety. And I wanted to be able to mix everything together and have no one know the difference. Yeah, right. So that was always the goal. So all my heavily worked stuff, all of that comes out. I did that up for good breeders. Everything's the same. I can get crazy variation or nothing like that. Of course there's slight, slight little differences. Maybe one tastes a little bit more than the other, but they all have the same turf profile. But compared to the lines even 15, 20 years ago, the uniformity is vastly different though, right? Like that's the thing. There'd be small differences, but to most people they wouldn't even probably notice those differences. Most people aren't going to know the differences at all.  I always feel like I can do better.  There are people who are like, dude, let them out, let them out. But like I'm just not 100% with them. So they're just tucked away. I wanted to ask you sort of an open question here. So you mentioned Gelato before and obviously you're someone who is known for working with older stuff and you know, preserving some of that. What's it like to work with modern hype stuff? What are your thoughts on that? I haven't worked too much stuff. But the stuff that I worked with, I get more hermaphrodites out of them. The newer stuff, all the cookie stuff. Yeah. The Gelato 33 has been my favorite. More because of the structure of the plant. It grows big. Super easy. The buds are really big. It's pretty. It smells good. Super easy to grow. Or like the other one. Right, super easy. Yeah. It was more of the structure of it. So this year I'm starting to work with bringing in that look. But keeping my flavors. Like you know, I'm going to try to get mixed. My first is I'm going to work a 707 kush into a, let's say, Oreos crossed to lemon cherry Gelato. And they came from obsolete. I did a big run of them. Like most modern stuff, not much flavor to it. Kind of like a doll vanilla flavor. Not much. But it looks incredible. So is your decision to work with some of the stuff strategic? In the sense of like, you know, so yeah. So this cut that I'm starting to work with it finishes really, really early outside end of September. Looks like indoor, but it lacks flavor. It lacks soul really. Has no flavor and not much of a buzz to it. So my plan is I'm going to incorporate the 707 kush.  Pick out the ones that have the look. But that OG can do it. Smoke them. If it gets me high goes around to, right? And these are I'm going to just do fence, right? I'm going to do, and I'll make S ones of them and then all those across sister plants together, you know, and then from that, just go forward. Get the potency, get the flavor I want, but have this modern day look and that's a plan I'm going to start doing with everything that I like smoking. First is that the 707 kush, which is a perfect blend of the Kaminoji. Yeah. And then next plan is with the potion, get that forbidden fruit flavor in there. And I didn't, I should have done it, but actually I didn't even have the plant when I was making the lemon tree ones, but also the lemon in there as well. Yeah. Early on, like in our show, I talked about breeding and the difference between breeding and seed making. And when I, when I've spoken about you before on the show, I referred you as a breeder's breeder. And I just wanted to illustrate this is because you don't, you don't do things with with no intention. Everything has a reason. It's an art piece that you're trying to create.  Almost see what happens type thing with everything. You know, so I really appreciate that. I hope everybody tunes in on that. Thanks man. Thanks man. And then the other thing with that Oreo's lemon cherry gelato, it finished hella early. So if I can get the look of that, have it finished early, but have potency of, of OGs and the flavor of OGs or, you know, whatever kind of flavor, that's ultimately cool. That's what I'm, that's what I'm going to try to work on like this next year or so. And they're, they're going to be femme. So I think it'll go pretty quick rather than, you know, like with males. If I try to chase that hype strain by the time I'm done making it, a thousand other people have already made it. Absolutely. By the time like I'm happy with the release, it's, it's, it's already gone done and moved on to something else. That's why I see all my like the older strains with me. That's it. I like what you're in outdoor production. I like what you're implying here as well. Like the sense that like on the one hand you're being fashioned forward, but you're also kind of sticking to your guns and trying to preserve like what you already know to be ideal for yourself. In the end, I'm really making seeds just for myself. I just got lucky enough to be able to make a buck off of them now. I feel really blessed off of it. But really it's like what, what, what do I need and what's going to fit my needs is, is something that finishes hell. Like outdoor greenhouse, more outdoor. I'm thinking of what usually is, I want to finish early to have a look.  And to be able to like grow out a hundred seeds outside and them all turn out exactly the same. You know, and especially now with the whole legal market and these commercial guys. Imagine if they were able to grow something like that, not have to worry about Hermes or nothing like that. And all the plants turned out the same.   Absolutely. Absolutely. And now you have to worry about HLV with clone and all sorts of other issues too, you know. Oh yeah, I experienced that for the first time this year. I got some clones and I really don't bring in clones too often. I ended up getting some kind of folks this year and a funky and I was like, what the fuck's going on with this? And started looking it up and then sent everything to the lab and boom, there it is.  Now I'm freaking out thinking, oh my God, it's spread to everything. And yeah, luckily it didn't spread and kept on retesting and retesting.  It is scary. Man, back in the day, we never had powdery mildew in the 90s. That wasn't a thing at all. I didn't even know about that until the early 2000s.  Yeah, it's just that easy. What was it?  That was all brand new.  So you go with seeds, good problems.  So that's pretty scary. So we've talked about that a little bit. I interviewed a HLV specialist and I was getting real specific with the questions because I wanted to know like, does this transmit in cannabis at that 8% rate that people keep quoting? And the fact is they haven't done any tests on cannabis and seed transmissions rate. They're bringing over rates from hops and just kind of assuming that it's going to be the same. Knowing exactly who's working with duds out there, what clones are dutted and how many of the seed makers are using them and people are popping those seeds, it can't be 8%. It just can't. It would be so massive right now everywhere through seed distribution. So I'm not sure. But yeah, the tests were hops-based, the 8% thing. But it will be interesting to see over time how it turns out. Yeah, totally. Totally.  I'm done bringing in clones. I did get a really good sour diesel this year. I was pretty stoked on. And I grew that motor breath 15 for the first time. That's a good one. Pretty stoked on that one too. Yeah, it's nice. It's a nice division of chem and OG. Is that what it is? Chem OG? It's cookies or something. No, motor breath is chem DOG. Chem DOG. Okay. That makes sense. I get the chem D flavor comes through and it's pote. It's a real pote. Yeah, it's a good one. But besides, yeah, I'm not bringing in anymore clients anymore.  And I think they deserve some props.  Yeah, dude. All the stuff that he made in Switzerland was awesome back in the day. Yeah. Look good, smell good. Bubble bags just came out around that time. They all washed, hella good. And everything was consistent. You grow out of pack of seeds.  Right. His stuff was really good. And then the Shanti Baba stuff back in the 90s. Yeah. What was rooted and I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I heard he was like, you know, making seeds for other companies like homegrown fantasies, you know, and he was just, and I remember those fantasies, too. They had an Afghani that was really, really good. And all of them came out pretty consistent. I never see their stuff at all anymore. They used to be a big brand and had a coffee shop and everything. And now you don't see anybody, nothing in anybody's collections from homegrown fantasies anymore.  Yeah. The end with, with, because I've grown out a lot of the Mr. Nice. It's definitely not the same as it was in the 90s. Yeah. Right. Like, yeah, who knows. But yeah, those were the two guys from back in the day that stood out. I could go on forever and ever with the people that I was disappointed with, but we won't go on. Yeah. Right. That's weed, bro. That's weed. I wanted to zoom out a bit and ask about the other kinds of breeding that Shah has mentioned, like dog, chicken, rabbit breeding and like, what has he picked up from there? And like what translates to cannabis breeding? It's, man, I think it's all the same. It's all, like all life breeding, it's kind of all the same. Even with people, it's crazy, but it's all very similar. Like you got an idea, like the rabbits, their meat rabbits. So like, let's say one of them has got a big, big legs, the hinds, but the backstrap isn't as big as it could be. So then, you know, I would take a male that has a big backstrap and cross it to the ones with the big hind legs. Or, you know, with dogs, I always go for structure. I want them to look a certain way. Bullies. I don't know. It's just to get to them. Yeah. Some reason I can't get rid of them. Bullies stocky look, right? And it's the same thing. You just got to, you just got to add or take away, you know, you find opposites. I find like, cross and opposites are the best, unless you got something in mind.  Then you just keep taking the smallest ones and bringing them together. Or, but like, let's say for full, like hybrid vigor, I find crossing opposites do the best. And I also like, myself, I find like people I find the most attractive people, like the opposite, black, white, Chinese, white, right? So, like, it's all pretty much the same. Doesn't matter what you're breeding. Like, it's all kind of the same. Yeah. Yeah. Traits. Traits. Traits. Traits. And the longer I've been into this, that's the one thing I've realized. Like, I paid so much attention to the stories that people would tell about these plants and then try to match up different things to the stories to see if it helped through. And in the end, I realized, fuck, you can just follow traits from the beginning all the way through these lines and see what the real story is. Like, you really can do that. It's possible. You have enough experience. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Like, I mean, let's just, the lemon tree, for example, like the windy guy says there's no sour diesel, but inside of it. But when I was growing them out, there was no sour diesel inside of it. Yeah. You can follow the back. Same thing with dogs. Like, you know, when you start breeding them, and if you get a list of the parents and the family tree pretty much, you can start pinpointing what goes to where and who does what, you know. That's got to be fascinating, actually. Never thought about it that way. That's pretty cool.  It's a really interesting kind of like psychological thing to kind of like deal with all these possibilities and try to map like possible outcomes, tendencies, that kind of thing. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I would say half the time it works out the other half, like I always, I would have these things envisioned in my head like crossing different flavors, it's going to turn out and this and the other, and rarely does it ever, like I would say, you know, 50% of the time it actually does, maybe from less than that. It's all trial and error. At the end of the day, it all comes down to trial and error, you know. You mentioned art before, and I think there is a distinct analogy there because there's only, there's only so much you can control.  But that whole thing is an art, you know, navigating that. Totally. That's how I've always felt. It's my own world.  Like just by how they look is the ultimate goal. So do you have any thoughts on how different cannabis breeding, let's see, what does it say different, how different the cannabis breeding market is now in 2023 compared to when you started? The seed market, how different it is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyone with a tent can be, make a seed company now, right? Yeah, right. You got Instagram, bro. Yeah. Like I said, I'm out of the loop. I don't really, I'm just kind of focused on my, in my own head and things that I'm doing. I don't really, like I don't know what anybody's really doing anymore. Yeah. It's probably the smartest move, man. The least amount of drama's involved when you keep your head low and out of that and just stick to the art. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I hate the drama behind it. So I just don't even, I'm not in it ever. Yeah. I get the sense that like your life takes you in many other directions and you don't need to spend all your time like in this world. Yeah. You know, I did the Canada community thing for a long time and it's definitely changed a lot the past 10, 15 years. You know, everybody before like, I mean, now everything's corporate pretty much.  We're back in the day.  I don't know. The whole thing has changed. The seed market, you know, the seed market actually, there's a lot more people, but probably hasn't really changed much at all.  I was saying that that's never going to change. That's always going to be there. The shenanigans pretty much. Always. Always. It's a black market.    I trust people in the black market more than I do people in the legal market. Absolutely. There's no honor in it. There's no, everything's a dollar sign. Like people just look at you with dollars in their eyes. There's no more community.  But it is what it is. It is what it is. So with that said, is there any other work you'd like to highlight that we didn't touch on, that you're working on now or in the past, you'd like to bring some attention to? I'm working on bringing all like my favorite smoke stuff into FEMS, like my own work. I'm going to be digging through some of these blueberry, these blue nectar seeds that I got and start working that heavily. The potions. I made those this summer, which I'm going to start digging through here soon, see how those turned out, but I'm pretty excited about those.  That's nice. So I'm excited about that. What else I got going on?  I don't know. I got my hands full. So, slowly but surely. I'm just busy. Yeah, yeah. So where can people find your work if they want to get it? I'm about to actually launch my websites.  I love it. I love hearing it, man. I wish every breeder would do direct sales. I think it's necessary now. It's kind of a necessary thing. Yeah, totally. I'm working on credit card processing. It's actually up and running right now, but it's not working. I'm just waiting for this bank to get my credit card application. So hopefully here in a week or two, that should be up and running. Then there's a list of people on there as well that they can find. There you go. What's a website? Yeah, that's providing. 707seedbank.com. 707seedbank.com. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that'll be exciting here. And then I got a bunch of like bulk seeds that are all great, but they just sit in for one reason or another. Like I got a bunch of like love candy processes on there that like the moms took over the structure, but they all have the love candy flavor to it. Just this Melanie, which they all do great, but I didn't feel like anything was improved. Right?  Do bulk seeds. Bucket seeds. Absolutely. See how they do.  Well, with that, I want to thank you for coming and spending your time with us, dude. It's been a real honor. And again, like I said, like my first, my first experience knowing who you were was talking to other people that have been around a long time.  Oh, who is this guy? And I learned more and more. And the more I learned, the more I respected you. So I appreciate you taking your time to talk to us. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this forever. So I definitely wanted to thank you. Cheers. All right, man. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's been a blast. Any last words you want to get in? No, thank you guys. Appreciate being on here. It's been a blast. All right, brother. Well, thanks for having, or thanks for coming on and spending your time with us. And hopefully we'll have you again soon. You're up for it. Right on, guys. Want to sit at the table with the syndicate? Check out our Patreon and our link tree or description below. Our merch site is officially live. We have all sorts of shirts, hoodies and goodies to sort you out. And shipping is super fast. And most importantly, the quality is top notch. I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose. So please check it out. Syndicategear.com. We also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together daily. It's an amazing community of learning away from IG. And it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge. We hope you join our union of breeders and growers. Come check it out.


What's going on everyone? Sam here, late in sports cards, ripping one box of 22 penini capstone baseball for Brian F. So good luck Brian. Let's see who we got in here for everybody. Is it really? 1-1 T-Lobby nasty. 1-1 T-Lobby really awesome dude. There's Shawn Minaya on the Peak Jersey car for the Padres, Javi Baez, Stephen Kwan Rookie, Carlos Correa Summit. What's up? What's up Greg? Greg. Robinson Cano as an Atlanta Brave. Brave's legend Robinson Cano. Oh my. That's hilarious dude.  That was a brave. God he was there. There's Dylan Coleman for the Royals, 30 out of 99. Dylan Coleman. O'Neal Crews New Age Rookie. I think these also say age 6 plus so. What are you doing, Coach? You need to stop handling the guards over there. Except for what? Go golf. Yeah 8 o'clock at night. No, no I'm saying can we beat him? Oh can we beat him in golf? 3 shots to 1 and we can't. 15 out of 75 is Matt Manning. It depends. I mean there's a very good chance our team chemistry can go down the drain at some point. Real good chance at him. That would be kind of pathetic if we lose. Yeah but if he's coming out there stomping it there ain't nothing. Hunter Green yeah then we're just just tip your cap at that point. Are you shaking? Louis Heal. Summon Otto for the Yanks not numbered. Big Bang, Austin, Riley. You also have the element of you'll be able to get under a skin which is good. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta hit that part of it. Yeah. Always psychological part of it. Oh yeah. Deja Vu.  Oh yeah. They threw me out of an NFL air it out. 3 on 3 competition one time because I was talking. Hunter Green, Gold foil. We were working boys too and eventually they threw me out. Yeah, I threw the football, got mad at the plan after the football like into the parking lot and they were like you did it. Then I went nuts on that and then I couldn't play at the ball and there it out. New H-Bomb shut. Dude we were murderous people too man. Last pack here. Deja Vu. That'll do it for your break there Brian. Thanks as always my man for the sport. We'll get those right out to you buddy.


Hey everybody, I'm Kaspar and today I'm going to talk about a step to step guide to platforming your delivery setup This is an incredibly Interesting topic at a time where the category of internal developer platforms and platform engineering in general is rapidly accelerating Really quickly about me. I have been doing platforming for the last 10 years. I Am working with and on the community's internal developer platform.org platform engineering.org I'm organizing platform engineering slack Platform engineering meetups with many other others. Obviously platform con the largest Conference in that space and I'm also working with the team at humanitech a platform orchestrator if you have any Things you want to talk about then please feel free to reach out I'm very much enjoying these direct outreaches ping me at Kaspar at humanitech.com or on my Twitter handle Kaspar official Now in this talk in these next couple of minutes I want to talk about what platforming actually is Why we do that and then I wanted to give you a step-by-step guide to nailing your platform journey This is something very new and Many of you are struggling where to actually start the benefits of this are pretty obvious But finding that starting point and designing your journey and setting yourself up to success is Non-trivial because there is not that much material out there And I want to make a small contribution to this and I hope I can help you on your path Now what's the actual problem statement? Let's frame this problem set a little better if you look at our situation today and you compare that to our situation 10 12 years ago Then the total numbers of services and dependent resources are architectures are vastly more complex than they were before We're using a lot more specialized tooling every Second week. There is another part of the two chain evolving Security tools and scanning things are getting shift left all the time. So we have a Larger complexity in our architectures and we have a lot more tools to somehow deal with and at the same time the pressure on Us as an industry and as the people in this industry is ever growing We have thousands hundred thousands of users. There is a pandemic that is increasing digitization even further And because of that complexity because of that pressure The average team is wasting 25% of their time just operating their app as this complexity increases at the same time what they actually want to do is focus on coding but a lot of the things get lost in the Communication in the team and the vast cognitive load of the two chain Now our response to that complexity is really manual work and scripts so if we have Microservice application running in the cloud. We're trying to shoo home stuff together and we're throwing Terraform files and when we're very fancy we throw cross-plane files and we are Trying to bake these things into Helm charts and Yummels and complex pipelines and Jenkins beasts and all of that but that makes developers brown in the complexity and Operations as well and everybody is waiting. Nobody's really Making any progress. Nobody's really satisfied. There is this constant tension between do I offload too much to my engineers? I shift a lot of things left or do I abstract them from stuff which wakes which takes away context. That's also and Dangerous, so how do you actually navigate in this uncertain environment? My answer is you build platforms you build internal developer platforms because these platforms help application developers to self-serve things without waiting While even reducing cognitive load There's no value in shifting things left when the person we're receiving end of that shift left is Drowning in complexity and cannot actually do the job that she's she's paid for and the same time again You want to do that without abstracting. It's very important I'm always comparing that to natural language processing if you hit NLP with 95% accuracy You still think and you still distrust zero Alexa You really want to be able to do everything, but you want to do that you don't want to have to Operate everything at once all the time We call that I call that abstracting but without actually taking context having golden paths You can rely on that's platforming that is the value for application developers and for the platform and SRE and DevOps teams or whatever Name you're using these days. It's about driving standardization by design It's about maybe trying to prevent 180 different ways of spinning up RDS But giving these five ways that are securely vetted and work well and setting starting points from which the teams Can actually expand and build on and it's about reducing ticket ops many of you are in a Situation where you're bombarded with Gira tickets. I need a new Environment here. I need a new database there. Can you help me debug that? Deployment that is not very productive. We've had that situation Throw over the fence operations if you want a decade two decades ago It is not something that we want to go back because you should actually be able to focus You should be able to focus on further automation on making sure our delivery approach is secure Let me use an analogy of the automotive industry an immature organization Would tell a team to build a car They would give them a credit card and then tell them you can find your raw materials in this store Then when these teams would struggle they would send in people to help them organize that and then they would call that DevOps Now a mature organization would tell teams to build a car and they would give them the credit card And they would tell them where to find the raw materials and then if teams struggle DevOps helps them organize and cloud operation teams helps them to find the right materials and then prep those for them and The next evolution you've guessed it Advanced organization tell teams to build a car and then the platform team prepares a platform and The developers build on top That is common practice in almost every industry and there is no reason to believe that this Shouldn't be a good approach in the software industry as well Now the result of what you platform the sum of all things is what we call an internal developer platform It is the sum of all things that form a golden path for developers one that developers can take But they don't have to they can deviate from that There are many tools these days that say We are an out-of-the-box IDP and what these tools actually are our platform as a service. Think of it like a Roku a Platform an internal developer platform is what you build for the specific needs of your organization if you're looking at this from a flow perspective, it And can passes your IDE where you develop this code that is then connected to your version control system where you merge your code It is connected to your CI pipelines where we build to your registries Then you might be using something like a CD controller or more modern platforms Maybe a platform orchestrator and then all the way to your infrastructure all of that is part of your platform And then there are many interfaces that your Platform might have there might be an API into parts of the controller or orchestrators It might be fully good ops-based. It might be a UI. It might be a CLI it Is definitely wired up with your observability suite. You might have something like a service catalog or portal such as backstage or Lina X or any of these tools So again a platform is the sum of all things is how you craft your different tools into something that works well for developers With all that with all of this new information thrown at you, where do you actually start and I want to give you a step-by-step guide that is a little more reduced than all of the flood of information That is usually thrown at you Let's actually start with what I would propose you do as a step number one you say And you communicate that to your team and management. We are going to test this approach But we are going to do all in or nothing Any time I personally have done something 80% and not a hundred where I've not actually pulled through and Bumper hole exercise I have failed. I really believe in all in all nothing And in order to reach all in you and all nothing you have to treat your platform as a product and that means you have to assign a product owner and if This product owner doesn't have enough for a full-time position. Maybe it can be half or a quarter a Platform can start very small. You don't have to start with a big bang So maybe you don't need a full-time position there But you want to have somebody who makes sure that there is a roadmap and then there are user interviews and You understand that you have users.  This is a product and it's getting better The more you realize that it actually is a product now then Step second Prioritize that is the most common fallacy that I see in platform engineering I wrote a long article around this the 10 fallacies of platform engineering that I Encourage you to have a look at as well Prioritization and what people often get wrong is that they think about the application life cycle and maybe the journey of the developer and Then say well, why don't we start at the start? Why don't we optimize how somebody spins up a new microservice or starts a new application or How somebody gets on board? all of these things sound fairly obvious, but Just because something is at the beginning Doesn't necessarily mean it's actually giving you the return on investment that would move the needle Which is actually what you want with a platform a platform only makes sense if you save time for your users now think about this example Optimizing how to spin up a microservice. What would you probably do? you would Set a baseline microservice that would already contain the way you want to have a Python flask service configured and Then you might want then you would might be built because you think that Looks more beautiful a nice UI where you would hit a button and it would clone the repository and maybe run a pipeline That will take you a good amount of time You'll throw together an Angular product like front-end whatever and it will feel not that complex for the start But it will you'll add this and you'll add this and you'll add this now afterwards developers are able to Click that button and it would do exactly the same thing as if they would go into github templates and just clone a template and You have a lot of effort just waste it for something that probably doesn't move the needle and is more nice to have So how do you make sure you do the things that matter and that move the needle now? I have an exercise that I'm using that might help you as well Gather your colleagues and say Think of a hundred deployments. We're deploying a hundred times How often do you do things that go beyond the static case of updating an image, right? I mean for updating an image. Everything is in place.  That's probably the part you figured out but how often In Stabilized against 100 deployments. Do we do things that go beyond the simple update of an image things where we might introduce errors where We might need the help of others where having a golden path is actually great This could be things like you want to change Configurations you want to change the architecture you want to onboard a new colleague you want to refactor You maybe want to spin up a new microservice. You want to spin up in new environment You want to roll back any of these things how often do you do them? So here these numbers are an exercise that I made with a team a team That was fairly fast scaling and you can see that they're adding an environment variable every 20 deployments And then all of that and they need a new environment every 300 deployments all of that doesn't feel like a lot But then if these individual things happen, they eat a lot of time from development and a lot of time from operations teams Now if you add all of that up You'll come up with a pretty considerable amount of time that is wasted on just these things that go beyond the simple Update of an image. It's almost like a hockey stick function Everything is fine. Everything is fine And then if you do these things that go beyond the update of an image you actually produce a huge amount of overhead and cost Now do that exercise force rank be brutally honest with you that is where you find your ROI This is where you should actually get started now the next thing that Many teams get wrong is that they try to build platforms that and can pass everything and I Get where you're coming from because you maybe you might be working in in enterprise with a lot of legacy and I mean even in a scaling startup, whatever you'll have a lot of legacy and you try to Cater everything and you will fail if you do that because there is No team in the world and not no budget endowment that your management can give you that can cover everything That is a dream and nothing but a dream if you want to build something that works Well, you have to agree on the lowest common denominator with all of the people and in your team and you can say if you want to go off that beaten path you can do that but That means you're on your own. We don't support you. You're on pager duty and you have to deal with the consequences Now whatever you come up with stick to it. It's very likely that you're going to standardize on containers and cubanettis and One or two managed providers and a couple of databases But find that lowest common denominator and the smaller you make your text tag The better you will actually do as the platform team. You have a very high interest on keeping your text tag Small re number four identify a team of future evangelists One of the fallacies that I'm seeing is that people want to do this big bang. They want to do everything at once I call the everything at once fallacy Not a very good idea Identify this one team that is bursting from Joy of doing something innovative that really feel the pain that want to get better This team has to have an application That matches exactly your target lowest common denominator text set up Right. Let's stay in the cubanettis world They are building an application that is running one hundred percent on eks And they're using a couple of databases terraform, whatever, but it's what you've optimized against and you are focusing on this and they match exactly this material Take these people Make him make them your friends and focus on them with extreme dedication Arguably too much dedication, which brings us to step to the next step You have to make a decision on the general architecture, especially on configuration management, something that not enough people actually think about And you basically have two choices. You have dynamic or static configuration management Now, the more modern internal developer platforms that we're seeing are using what we call static config dynamic configuration management That means rather than having pre-baked YAML terraform combinations for every environment, you are building what we call a declarative application model Like a baking recipe on how your application should look like across all environments And they are then taking that declarative application model and execute this against a platform orchestrator Which reads this model and creates a dynamic, dynamically creates a representation of this configuration and actually deploys that as an application into your infrastructure That has a lot of advantages to this more modern approach because you can now standardize certain profiles on the workload, config and infra level Across the organization, your developers can stay on a higher level abstraction while still seeing all of the different components It enables you to really keep consistency and high maintainability across all of these things and it makes for a very good developer experience So my usual recommendation is try to apply dynamic configuration management But if that for some reason isn't possible, you can still stick with the current approach that most teams have historically been using That is a static configuration management and that means you have your workload and you have static YAML files per environment And then you have static infrastructure as code elements and you have a CD controller like an IWO CD that's just taking these files and syncing them with the infrastructure Now, as a next step, let's go off and actually start building And here the trick is to build something that serves your ROI calculation return on investment that we did at the beginning Like what is the priority? Where do you yield the best results? It has to fit to your team of evangelists, right? The folks that love you so much or are supposed to love you so much And it has to be on your lowest common denominator text tag And then you want to build an experience that is 10x better than anything that your team has seen before Many of these platforms fail because they promise a lot and what they deliver as the future platform is even has more edges and is more raw And is not actually making a difference for the individual contributor I call that the tragedy of the commons problem, right? It's like climate change If you build something that's great for the organization but it doesn't move the needle for the individual contributor, nobody's going to use it, right? You win nothing On this first project, I encourage you to spend way too much time, way too much time Overallocate too much time in getting this one thing to a degree where people look at this and say, wow, this is really nice That's 10x better than what we've been using before And then make sure your evangelist team loves it because only if they love it, they will do something that will make you long term successful They will go to all of their colleagues in the organization and say, hey, we're using this product now, we're using this platform We are already on the new flow and it's so much better You really have to try it Pull always works much better than push Last but not least, this will be a very long journey It's a long journey that never ends You have to iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate When you have your first project and that is 10x better Even if it's only doing this tiny little thing, getting you a new namespace better than what you had before Then you take the next approach and you again look at your ROI and you again do user interviews And you again treat your platform as a product And again, you're going into the details and you're figuring out what's the next best thing to work on And you continue building golden paths, you continue winning over evangelists that then create a pull factor That is the way how you make platforming and building an internal developer platform long term successful There's also a growing community of practitioners around platforming You're not alone with this, there are channels just for product owners of platforms There are even job boards just for platform engineers There's a very vivid conversation going on We have platform con coming up, thousands of fellow platform engineers Are people that are interested to doing that or becoming such Joining us on the I think 9th and 10th of June 2022 And I encourage you to take part in that as well There are platform engineering meetups, I'm sure there is one next to you Or you can start your own and there are learning materials on sites like platformengineering.org I encourage you to become part of this community to join me in taking this category and taking this way of working forward I am convinced that in five years almost every team has these platforms And I would also encourage you to get in touch with me and let's chat about these things Ask me questions, I'm always happy to help I'm personally working on Humanitech and with Humanitech And Humanitech is a platform orchestrator that is optimized for dynamic internal developer platforms It's a component that can help you build reliable platforms that developers laugh really fast And it's fairly widely used if there is anything I can show you around that Also feel free to reach out For now, thank you so much for listening to that talk And I hope to see you soon online or offline