Hey, I'm Dustin Schaffer here, and we're just talking about fasting. I get this question a lot. Like, does drinking ketones interrupt my fast? Is it messing things up? And, uh, well, this is interesting.   Like what result are you looking for? That really is what you need to know. If you're looking for fat loss or energy or vitality, or you're looking for longevity and health, well, there's a lot of variables in place. If you're, if you have a, uh, a big health challenge and you're trying to clean out your GI track and, and heal the gut lining, well, it's, it's a little, a little bit different. So I have some research here. I just decided to pull up because, well, that's who I do. And this is a molecular mechanism, uh, mechanisms and clinical applications. They're all around fasting with Dr. Longo and Dr. Madison, I'm sorry, Mattson, and they talked about fasting and they kind of defined it as, you know, it, it's a lot of variations. It's really being in a significant caloric deficit without being in starvation. That was their definition of fasting because religion is around, religion is around the world, um, basically, you know, go 40 hours, 24 hours. There's a book out there, really famous one, 40 hours, right? I don't have heard of that one before, but, um, uh, there's, that's a fasting state. What is that is that is elimination of food for that amount of time. Although they, then they stated that, you know what, you can still be in a really good fasted state.  So you'd be maybe consuming anywhere from, uh, let's say a hundred calories, no calories to a hundred calories to 500 calories. They would still consider that a fasting state because the primary mechanism of fasting that they're looking at for most importantly, longevity, vitality, health, fat loss, all these major benefits that most people are all looking for. What they're looking for is your insulin levels to be nice and regulated, no instability or spikes of blood sugar. They're also looking for elevated ketone levels. So when people go, well, does my, those drinking ketones wreck my fast? Is having keto cream wreck my fast? Well, if it doesn't impact those things, then no, it doesn't based on their, their science and research. And, and so it does not enter, interfere with their fast. Um, and the reality is, is that fasting is just elimination of something, right? You're reducing or eliminating something out of your diet. Um, what people think it means is I don't ever eat food again. And I don't ever put anything, any calorie in my body for a certain amount of time. Well, that's an extreme measure that, um, may or may not actually work well for most people because of the extremness of it, especially if you do it for a longer period of time. So they recommend to do intermittent fasting. They recommend 24 hour fast as long as you go to no longer than 72 hours unless you're using guidance. So if you're, if you're going past 72 hours, you should be really working with a health professional. So I thought it was really, really cool. So drinking ketones, I drink it every day. I intermittent fast every day and it does not break my fast. It maintains my, my, my, my numbers are all stable. I feel great. My ketone levels are elevated. I have vitality, energy. Um, I'm scientifically going to live longer, have more health benefits, improve my brain function, still maintain muscle mass. That's really important for five and a half years, almost six years doing this, maintaining muscle mass and strength, even though I'm eating less. But I had a lady hit me the other day. She's like, well, Dustin, I, I like to work out and I want to improve my performance. And I go, well, and she goes, but is drinking ketone before my workout going to mess with my fast? I go, well, what's your goal again? Increase performance. I go, well, do you perform well when you're fasting? And she goes, well, I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I go, well, drink ketones before. And if you perform better, then it's achieving your goal. If that makes sense. So people try to put everything into a box. And the reality is, is that what you're really wanting to do is you're wanting to eliminate processed food, eliminate excessive food, create windows where you're not overeating food that requires heavy digestion or requires your blood sugar to have to stabilize and shift really quickly. You want to reduce or eliminate those things. If you're a fitness person, fast on your off days perform.  I don't do that anymore, but I used to because I performed better that way. So I would tell you this, if you're going to fast, which I encourage you to do intermittent fasting, 24 fast, 60 hour keto reboot fast, I would encourage you to utilize ketone technology during that process. Why? Because it improves ketogenesis. You get more ketones in your system, you have more energy, you feel better. You don't, you're not as craving as much. So therefore when you come out of your fast, you don't over binge eat, which can, you can negate some of the fasting states and the long-term quality of brain function, muscle function is there to support you. So it's, it's, it's a no brainer in my mind. I actually also encourage people that, that want, that need to or want to increase their fat intake, have your keto cream in the morning as a prolonged fast because it's still going to maintain that same standard. So does drinking ketones break your fast? No, unless you live in a box and you think that you have to do these extreme things every single day to be successful, then you're just weird. Like I used to be, I used to be that guy. So drink your ketones during your fasting states and you will feel better than ever y'all. So that's the one to punch on fasting. Cheers.


Hi, this is Don Scheng with the Red Hat developer program today. We're going to in this video We're going to take a look at how to install .NET framework in your RAL virtual machine if you don't have the virtual machine installed check the link below For instructions a little short five minute video on how to install so I'm at the PowerShell prompt So I'm going to SSH into my VM. I've already started it And then it's just a matter of running Six commands and Tweaking a file So so forgive my bad typing. I could you know cut and paste but that'd be too easy, wouldn't it? So the first thing I want to do is get a list of what's available in my subscription Because at the end there's a pool ID right there it is and I'm going to use that in the next statement Copy that attach Well, I'm not taking very well the day. I It sounds like I'm really hammering my keyboard, but I'm not just the sound travels through my desk and into the microphone So that's why I'm not I'm really not abusing my keyboard. I promise So this is going to attach to that pool which includes the software I need And then I'm really not on today I'm going to tell which repo to enable Which will be well Seven Now in my case, I'm using server here. There's also workstation If you're running red hat enterprise language workstation, but I'm running server And that's what you get with the VM that you download with the red hat development suite Okay, this this takes a little bit of time For some stuff down at the end And then after this we we basically have to install a Utility and then we actually install Got in the core Okay, it's enabled You know young install That's why I mean, I don't bother asking me You know if I approve of it because you know you're gonna say yes So this installs it Utility It's not huge though. The one of the nice things about that in that core is it's really compact when you Like you only get the core and basically the very Functionally very very basic and then when you when you code you You tell it which dependencies you want to pull the bits that down in so that's really nice because you can get a lot smaller You know applications So now it's now it's installed But it's not available And when I run this command, it's gonna it's gonna enable it, but it's gonna open a new bash session What they do So now I should have gotten that available thing there it is but what I want to do yet is Is add it to this file or see which is off the root It's off the root of the user The user's home director there go down here and add if you've never used them. Oh boy, it's fun So this source which basically like runs a file in But what what happens here is every time you log in To your VM now it'll run this and then they will dot net core So if I do an exit here watch it doesn't get out of VM because remember I started another bash session So now I exited the second one exit now now I'm back to PowerShell Directly show you right now vagrant SSH and every time I do this now the dot net core will be available Let's see. Boom. There it is. So that's how you do the install the next video I do I'll show you how to share files between Your VM and your Windows host and then that opens doors like then you'll be able to edit from Visual Studio code In Windows against files that are on your VM. So there you go That's this video and stay tuned and watch out for the next one. Thanks Just to recap. Here's a list of the steps that we did Notice that the first step you get the pool ID and then you use that on the second step The rest will be the same The third step if you're using workstation substitute the word workstation for the word server Otherwise, that's it. You're good to go


It's my great pleasure to introduce this evening's lecturer, Dr. Karen Katowski is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and various roles for the National Security Agency. After retiring, she became a noted critic of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Katowski is known for her insider essays denouncing a corrupting political influence on military intelligence, especially leading up to the 2003 Iraq War. In 2012, she challenged incumbent Bob Goodlett in the Republican primary for Virginia's sixth district in the U.S. House of Representatives. She contributed to Ron Paul, A Life of Ideas, and Why Liberty, Personal Journeys Towards Peace and Freedom. She has been featured in several documentaries, including Why We Fight. She has written for LewRockwell.com since 2003 and her work has appeared in Salon and the American Conservative. Katowski has an M.A. in government from Harvard, an M.S. in science management from the University of Alaska, and a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America. Her thesis was entitled Angola, a Case Study of the Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine. She's a founding member of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. Dr. Katowski will speak to us on the Pentagon and me, Curiosity versus the State. Please welcome her. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that kind introduction.  So I hope you enjoy what I have to say, but we will have time for lots of questions. So if there's something that I don't cover, which there will be a lot, just make a mental note and that's always the most fun at the end. So it was over 20 years ago in the summer of 2002 in the Pentagon when I really had my eyes open to the corrupt state and what it is about. It was a long journey, and since then I have discovered so much more about how the state functions, the extent of its impact, and its innate evil in many ways. Is it strange to use the word evil? For many years I did not use this term because honestly I thought cronyism and incompetence, lack of accountability, and the kind of people who tend to become involved in power systems like a government or its agencies, all just simply combined to produce the outcomes that we see, endless boutique wars and on-demand coups that destroy small countries and enrich certain sectors of business and banking, corruption of language and thought for those of us who are citizens of the Empire, along with the degradation of religion, culture, and of course our money. It's like there's a huge machine of state and it grinds up life and liberty on a daily basis. It's a depressing idea and it's not a new one. The Old and New Testaments are full of stories and examples of an all-consuming state, a structure for the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. In some ways the complaints of Marx were valid, but he narcissistically imagined it could be improved if only he were in charge. The 20th century brought us more dystopian observation and complaint. We have the depressing views of Orwell and Huxley, where an all-powerful state cannot be beaten back or changed. We have equally depressing views of the Malthusians, eugenicists, and statist environmentalists where math, biology, and politics merged together in a horrific way for purposes of denying both nature and God. For those who don't know my story, I spent 20 years in the United States Air Force and the last five of those years I was a political military affairs officer, a paper pusher in operations planning for the Air Force. Later I did much the same thing for the office of the Secretary of Defense. The best part of most jobs is the people that you meet. For me I met people I would never have met otherwise from all over, some of them who came from similar places as me and many who did not. One of the smartest guys that I knew was an F-16 pilot who did Air Force operations planning. His language was salty and hilarious. He probably wished he were flying every day instead of pushing paper and he was irreverent and honest. Most of the guys in that shop, which included pilots, navigators, logistics, com electronics officers, supply officers, all had great stories to tell. This guy wasn't big on telling stories, although he had some great ones. But it was for me his perspective that was enlightening. This guy needed and wanted very little from the system, except that one big thing which was to fly. His judgment and his analysis, the work he did for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force was top notch. He was one of the few people I ever met in the military who had no illusions and no fear. I cannot to this day remember his name, but I think the year or so that we sat next to each other was an important part of my development as a person. I was probably 38 years old then, still developing as a person. No illusions and no fear, what a concept that would be. I took what I knew and had learned and transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Planning Directorate, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa. I had been covering Sub-Saharan African operations in the Air Staff job and had written a small book the Air Force published on Air Operations in Africa. In the OSD level, the Office of Secretary of Defense level position, I did something similar. Well then I was looking at the African Crisis Response Initiative or ACRI. In that first study, I was looking at how physical and communication worlds work in that part of the world in Africa, from a U.S. perspective. Then in the second, I was able to see how military and foreign policy initiatives were done and their results. The physical world of radio waves and aircraft operations is rational, data-driven and scientific, not so for the world of government policy. I got to dig deep and in doing that found out that surprise, cover stories and public intentions are one thing, facts and practice, something very different, especially when you're looking at a government program. I also found that while many people believed the cover story and public intentions, a significant minority of people always understand more accurately what is being done and why. Now, this is who I was and what I knew when I was drafted into a different directorate of the Office of Secretary of Defense, the Near East South Asia Planning Office. It's a sister organization to where I was. This time I would be working North Africa policy side by side with new office mates who were working Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Iraq and Iran. Now, I left out my early life where I grew up in a family that, as a matter of tradition, despised FDR. That's the half of the country that my people represented in the 1930s and 1940s. FDR was long gone when I was born and yet he remains a hero of the state. So as a child, there was a sense that some of us are aware of a different story about FDR. Why my people hated him was not really explained to me beyond his socialism. Maybe that was enough. But I think it was his authoritarianism and his sense of entitlement that bothered them. As a young person, my takeaway was that my people don't like tyranny. Think about how popular that idea is across our country. It's hugely popular. And think about how many in America disagree and actually seem to like tyranny. Back to my last Pentagon position. I had a new set of 05 and 06 Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel co-workers. And now my learning curve on political bull and state fakery was not so steep. From my own research and my many unsuspecting mentors, I mostly knew who I could trust to speak the truth and who was invested in the cover stories. I learned that for nearly a year before the second invasion of Iraq, long before the public propaganda about aluminum tubes, Saddam Hussein in 9-11, and WMD stockpiles in Iraq, we were logistically planning to invade Iraq. And unlike in the 1991 invasion, this time we would remove Saddam Hussein a year before, 2002, long before the invasion. I learned that the intelligence that I and my co-workers utilized did not support the media blitz that began in the late summer of 2002. A media campaign fully implemented not just by Pentagon political appointees, but by those in the CIA, the State Department, a large part of the Senate and the House, particularly Republicans in line with the objectives of the Republican president of the time. I noticed that there were certain double standards of the release of classified, even top secret material to the press. Some types of information would be presented to us inside the Pentagon, as intelligence, classified intelligence. And the very next day would be published verbatim on the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, as if it were fact, and there was no interest at all by the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or Secretary of State or the Congress in identifying the leak. Much of this intelligence was not the result of measured intelligence analysis of a measured intelligence analysis process. And much of it was simply not true. Cherry-picked, unverified, or simply not yet proven to be false information. Those were simultaneously the criteria for both the classification of the information and the instant declassification overnight by leak to the front pages of the favored state media. It is not enough to, to quote Orwell, to repeat 2 plus 2 equals 5, you must believe it. In the summer of 2002, I began to write anonymous essays that would later be serially published by Colonel David Hackworth, Soldiers for the Truth website. I first contacted him with some samples of my black humor describing what I was seeing after the formation of the Office of Special Plans.  It was a handpicked group of political appointees and their civilian and military enablers who pumped out lies to support and popularize and shape a narrative for war that they were already committed to, but that was very unpopular among and counterintuitive to most Americans.  This Afghan invasion was also a fantastic cover story for other things we can talk about later. But the problem for the neoconservatives was that they were obsessed with the regime change, not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq and five or six other countries in the region that threatened Israel's expansion. And of course, Afghanistan wasn't on that list. So to get the story, to get Americans on board with a new war, an additional war in Iraq based on 9-11 complicity and WMD, it faced an uphill battle. Many Americans already believed we were going after the key culture of 9-11. And what, now the government made a mistake? I mean, that's not a good selling strategy. George W. Bush, Bush 43, was already a barely elected president, was very well known for mis-underestimating, that's his word. And for being easily led by his crafty vice president, Dick Cheney, and Cheney's longtime pal, Don Rumsfeld. So the Pentagon, which owns the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which is now the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Among many other intelligence gathering agencies, needed to ensure the right story could be told. The Office of Special Plans was the Pentagon's propaganda clearing house, run by a handful of hand-picked ideologues. And working with like-minded colleagues and offices across several other agencies in DC and the National Security Council, with the vice president playing an important and unusual coordinating role. Here we had a number of unelected neoconservative appointees with the same value system, all dedicated to creating this war, to implement a plan that they themselves had effectively designed and lobbied for from think tanks in the years prior to 2002. And what could go wrong? This Pentagon office was formally, of course, disbanded shortly after the invasion of Iraq on March 23rd, 2003. Its job was done. I have to look up the invasion date to be sure I couldn't remember exactly. And it is fascinating that the brave browser, AI Summarizer, described it as follows. On March 23rd, 2003, the US launched a surprise military invasion of Iraq led by US Army General Tommy Franks under the code name Yada Yada, Operation Iraqi Freedom, et cetera. A surprise attack conducted after a year of Pentagon logistics planning, preparation and movement of forces. A surprise attack that was engineered and preceded by a domestic and global propaganda campaign designed to produce it. A surprise that echoed and foreshadowed every other US government propaganda campaign we have seen in recent history, meaning long, tedious, and persistent. And when I say US government here, I'm really talking about a handful of in place connected ideological elites who know better than 99.999% of the population. Most people who bought into the lies told by government, much as we have seen repeatedly since then, are those people who really haven't taken the three or four minutes it would have taken for them to seek out some remnant of truths, to silently ask themselves a simple question or two. Some government employees, especially intelligence professionals and those with experience in US war operations, did take the time to understand what was happening and to separate fact from fiction. Most went along with the state narrative without question and those who didn't were quietly replaced. We can wonder why more people didn't stand up and resist the war propaganda. And this question requires an examination not just of how the government convinces the population to obey and support it, but also of economics, human psychology, and how people feel about their government. It's worth looking at this because, especially with the COVID experience, which we saw people like Kamala Harris swear, and I believe she did swear, she would never take a shot of an untested genetic therapy if it came from the Trump administration, only to adamantly demand this lifesaving and effective vaccine be mandated once her political party was in charge. How people feel about their government is important. So this is kind of what I saw and learned and in expressing my personal frustration with the lies I was hearing, lies being credited to my place of employment, having the very credibility of the institution I was part of being used to convince millions of people of absolute lies in order to achieve other clear, but certainly unstated US government objectives. Well, it's because of that that I began later to be able to share my perspective at lourockwell.com and elsewhere, and because of that my voice was added to the growing, small but growing, public chorus that seeks limited government and peace and opposes empire. This chorus has a wonderful and bold and brave history, and today continues in a world where it reaches millions of people. Perhaps because of this we find ourselves and liberty itself targeted by the most powerful state in the history of the planet. When we're President Eisenhower, what, 63 years ago, identified somewhat vaguely in his farewell speech a military industrial, possibly congressional complex. Today we have CIA analyst Ray McGovern's Mickey Mat, military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex entered into the modern lexicon. And you can look it up, it's in the dictionary. It would appear that the state is growing and winning in terms of wars and really constant wars since World War II for the United States empire. We see endless shifting waves of state intervention abroad and at home. We see the US participation in global imperialism in the form of non-government organizations like the World Economic Forum, which work hand in hand with government organizations or non-government organizations, the IMF, WHO, NATO, to name only a few. The US-Western European Mickey Mat is very effective at bludgeoning whole states, industries and populations abroad, and it is just as capable of bludgeoning them domestically. War is war. Orwell's boot, stamping on a human face forever, an Aldous Huxley's prediction that people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think seem to have come true. And yet, we live today in the most free and liberty inspired era that has ever been. I shared a bit of my story and perhaps have painted a picture of our US government as a gray, shabby, statist empire in its final phases, which likely will continue to fade and struggle for survival on for only a few more generations. And maybe we may live to see this struggle, this end. Historically, those who studied the lifespans of empires agree that they do not end suddenly, or if they appear to, it is only because they were failing long before the actual end. So I'm open to the idea, and actually quite hopeful, that I will live to see the end of the US empire. It has been in decline since the Civil War. It was punctuated with Wilsonian and FDR spikes of ideology and tendencies until a kind of progressive statism and state dominance throughout society became the norm and the rule for both major parties in 95% of our elected leadership after November 1963. The US empire has gotten more bloated, more sick, and more insane in the past 60 years. That successful coup removing John F. Kennedy and instantly reversing his most dangerous policies from the state's perspective was the start of the coda to use a musical term for our song of empire. The big picture can be depressing, but it doesn't have to be. I want to spend the next few minutes talking about the role of curiosity in my own experience, and in the larger sense of how we live and thrive as people, as society, and even our government. It starts with the individual, and as Americans by birth or by choice, we have a culture that celebrates curiosity. It is exactly this fundamental trait that is shared by most and the most dangerous enemies of the state. Let's start with where curiosity is not encouraged. There have been several iconic events of my lifetime, the JFK assassination and its aftermath of Vietnam, the first time we fought in Afghanistan alongside a young bin Laden, the fall of the Soviet Union, the first invasion of Iraq back in 1990. One, I guess it was, the Clinton NATO wars in Yugoslavia, 9-11, second invasion of Afghanistan, second invasion of Iraq, and the Ukraine situation today. These are all things that we are curious about and should be curious about. And yet, we are never really encouraged to learn more about these events or to even ask questions about them. And these foreign policy-related activities are just a tiny slice of our modern history. We could look at key events and trends in pharmacology, in domestic policy, in education, in industry, in energy or environment, in food production, in regulatory trends, in banking and money, in technology and entertainment, in religion. Again, in each of these areas, while we admit knowledge and learning has been integral to the advantages and achievements, actual layman-style curiosity is politically and institutionally discouraged. Perhaps this represents the rise of the technocrat, the emergence of an expert class, which by definition cannot or should not be questioned by the less able, the less technocratic, the less expert. Perhaps it is the decline of the study of philosophy and the state-driven official discouragement of, as Ayn Rand might say, checking our premises. Many of you have read Etienne de la Botte's The Politics of Obedience, the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. The young Etienne wonders why so many are so easily ruled, even to their detriment, by the few, and he explores the logic and the facts and comes up with some ageless ideas on how change can happen. You have studied modern anti-state ideas, decentralization, black and gray markets, how money dies, how societies shift or don't shift. Technology today, be it in communications, privacy and anonymity, finance, data, energy, war and peace, even free speech, forces us to think about the very things we should be thinking about, which is who has power, how and why, and do we submit to a ruler or a class or a movement, or are we ourselves the kings and queens, or a class and a movement to be recognized and reckoned with? Obviously, when it comes to curiosity, we're all born with it, and we very often learn to subdue and manage that native interest of how the world really works. Our endless whys are often met with no one knows, don't ask me anymore because I said so. Our desire to find out can be met with a story about how curiosity killed the cat. Modern society and the modern state discourages children and young people from exploration, adventure, and even small risk taking for good reason. Societies and systems are not interested in change, be it in the religious dogma, the power of the kingdom, the divisions in a feudal society. They can't abide citizens who are not afraid to ask real questions, to find out for themselves what is true. Imagine the terror felt by the powers that were at the invention of the printing press, at the endless proselytizing person to person of the early Christians, changing one mind at a time in a declining Roman empire. Today we have similar tools exponentially more powerful at our fingertips, and the state is right to be worried. And everything we are seeing today tells us that it is extremely worried. In fact, it is at war. The state's war on curiosity has two fronts, the input side, here's what you need to know and little else, and the output side, violators will be punished harshly, publicly, and viciously. Whether it's COVID, the latest war, criticism of a pet project of the state, the war's the same, the tactics are the same, and the objectives are the same. This war can be an easy win for the state if it succeeds in reducing the number and the impact of the curious. If the state can eliminate our native skills of curiosity, dehumanize us, isolate us from learning and debate, causes to be suspicious and fearful when we should be curious and exploratory, then it will win. Those dystopian perspectives I mentioned earlier, people who cannot move because of a boot on the face and cannot think because they have lost the skill of thinking speak to the inhuman, the inhumane, and the death of humanity. So to avoid that, we have to exercise the thing that makes us human that qualifies us as humane and constitutes humanity. We are all gifted with an amazing ability to learn, to retain knowledge, to think logically and abstractly, to understand the physical world directly, theoretically, and even emotionally. That's what it means to be human. Before I get to the list of important things I want to share, I want to share something that helped me think about my way of thinking and to really get curious. I think the reason people don't want to learn new things and question old things is because they don't want to be surprised and they also don't want to be wrong. I think we really have to celebrate being wrong when it happens and actually look for those opportunities. This, being wrong, happens to me all the time, but I have two examples that I think of often. The first was in late 1988 as the Soviet Union was coming apart and Eastern European satellite countries were gaining independence. I was taking a graduate class at Harvard on Eastern Europe as part of my government degree there and we had to write about the expected order of liberty in these countries, which one would be first to leave the Soviet Union and become a democracy and which would be last? So I wrote my analysis and I go with the most oppressed and least free country will depart first and the most free where citizens have it better than most other Eastern European countries would be the last to leave the Soviet sphere. I picked Romania first and Poland last. My order of liberty was 100% wrong and while I wasn't an expert on Eastern Europe by any means, chances are, since I was studying this at Harvard, I was probably in the top 5% of Americans who were thinking about and studying the history and politics of the region at the time. As it turned out, it wasn't what I knew that was wrong but it was my assumptions and to a degree my definitions. In getting it wrong, I became very curious about how I could be so wrong and what were my assumptions and how did I define things? Long after that class, I was still learning on this topic. The second example of a wrong prediction occurred around the same timeframe and this prediction related to what would happen to NATO after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. So I expected it would shrink. It would become less significant as its reason for being had largely evaporated. In fact, NATO immediately expanded its mission description and began to court new members from its former mortal enemies. And again, I was wrong because my assumptions about NATO, what it was, its purpose and focus were incorrect. And this time I noticed that my incorrect assumptions were absolutely based on the public story of NATO, the very same story people in the West generally accepted to be true. Why was that public story so wrong and yet so prevalent? These two examples may seem small and not very special but I think for me as a person interested in how the state works and foreign affairs and war, they were pivotal. My husband is a lifelong soccer coach and he's very competitive. And I've learned from him, half listening really, but I've learned from him that it's mostly the losing team that learns anything. The losing team demands to understand why and how while the winning team is satisfied with the what. The losing team gets to analyze, compare and ask uncomfortable questions. It gets to examine strategy, gather information from a variety of sources, integrate all this information and figure out what's really happening. On top of that, the losing team has to do this in an emotional space where they would probably rather cry, beat someone up or just quit. So I've chosen the concept of curiosity as a key to our battle with the state and its battle against everyone. It's not just okay to find out where our assumptions are partially incorrect or incomplete or even completely wrong. It's the first thing we should be looking at. It's not just okay to be on the losing side or in the minority. That's often the most educational place to be. We can develop our skills of curiosity just like any other skill and as we do this because we are humans, we will find out that it's extremely fun, intellectually stimulating and of course for the thrill seekers out there, it can be dangerous. It's also useful to others. When we learn, examine, question productively, make inferences, test theories, share and debate possibilities, research and compile, think, we are not only more able in general, we are better soldiers in the fight against centralized authoritarianism, totalitarianism, tyranny, dehumanization and death. By the way, the state, our rulers in whatever form or whichever era, it knows we are curious and the state seeks to shape and direct that curiosity. Bread and circuses, 2000 years ago as today and tomorrow is the go-to tactic to divert our incredible observational skills and analytical skills and powers of curiosity away from what the state is doing to us and for us in spite of us, the Mickey Mac, Mickey Mat, I always say that, which also touches on sports entertainment, gaming and gambling industries is heavily invested in having us feel like we're on the winning team. That's the team that doesn't have to assess its assumptions, its performance, its goals. It's the team that never has to ask an uncomfortable question or really examine its collective skill set. Who doesn't want to be on the winning team? If you're here today, you're already curious about how things work, how the economy works, how humans interact and behave, what the world is like every minute of every day. We are built to pursue understanding and in this regard we are also built for peace. I do not recommend that we approach our life and work with the goal of being a troublemaker. We should just seek to understand honestly and then simply be honest about it. Blurting out that the emperor has no clothes might work fine for a child or a jester but children and jesters are protected by their very role in society. It might be better to pose questions that can lead others to their own improved and more accurate assessments. Dilaboti suggests that people willingly become slaves because they value going along with others to feel safe with others or to simply feel safe intellectually. We cannot underestimate the value of feeling safe and I think our enemy the state understands this very well and we've seen repeatedly in the past decades all state-hyped hysteria hinges on an idea of safety suppressing and punishing curiosity by design. This seems always to result in greater state control and greater centralization. It is important for everyone but especially those of us with a greater interest in the state to be curious and to engender curiosity in others. Towards that end, here's some of the things I advise. And there are many articles and studies out there on how to be more curious. Our public schools of course create a huge market for this kind of adult therapy. How we can be more curious and more importantly, how do we inspire others to be more curious? And so I wanna mention four techniques and practices that can help. And I've mentioned one, be willing to be wrong. Embrace that possibility. Of course, we may feel we are not wrong but by overtly being willing to be wrong we set an example for others who in fact may be extremely wrong. And if I'm able to walk through an argument or a topic where I could be mistaken I'm allowing everyone else to feel okay doing the same. I haven't mentioned mass formation psychosis but many of you may have been thinking about it a little. Mass formation psychosis is a favorite weapon as it induces society and citizen to shut down curiosity about or investigation of a state or politically induced catastrophe. We are not to ask questions about 9-11 nor wonder if an assassination death or disappearance of a political leader, activist or witness to a state crime is anything other than bad luck. To counter this phenomenon we have to deal with the four main pillars that predispose a society to mass formation psychosis. And these include a lack of social bonds and connections a lack of sense making. Things don't seem to make sense. The other necessary components are free floating anxiety and free floating psychological discontent. When you break it down like this we can see why the mickey mat includes media, academia and think tanks. They can and often do play an outsized role in promoting social disconnection, senselessness, anxiety and discontent. When we are willing to be wrong we are giving ourselves and everyone else permission to also be wrong along with us. We are being people with people not isolating them. We are showing compassion, easing anxiety and we are seeking answers, seeking what is sensible, what is solid. To be willing to be wrong is courageous and in that it quells fear. Courageous comforting to the frightened and can allow them to start thinking logically again. Next thing, practice careful listening. I have a friend who when she's about to say something that's really important to her precedes it with now listen carefully. And I usually am not listening carefully because I don't practice this important skill as often as I should. And yet it is the ability to listen to hear with understanding that is purposely destroyed in a state or agenda fostered mass psychosis event. We saw this so vividly in the COVID response and the elevation of fear to a level that simply shut down any new learning. A person questioning any aspect of the government message of the moment was immediately attacked.  The damage to relationships between people, families, communities and places of business everywhere and at every level has been almost permanent. Maybe it's not completely permanent but we have not healed yet. One of my brothers called me a threat to our mother repeatedly, potentially her murderer repeatedly because I did not agree with a certain Dr. Fauci before he changed his mind on something. This memory has caused me to wince every time he signs off of our weekly FaceTime group chats with I love you. I do not trust his judgment as I once did and I thought he was always the smart one in the family and thus I cannot trust my own judgment. This is exactly the desired impact of a state induced crisis and response cycle. The state is at war and this is the battlefield. So in this battlefield, the target of the state is our very relationships, our ability to trust each other, to listen to each other and to learn truth together. So listening is not just what we do for our benefit but we ought to model good listening for others and we illustrate good listening by asking good questions and so the third thing for me is to develop our ability to ask questions that inspire and reveal more questions. This is the scientific method for the most part. It's also the key to writing a good mystery novel. I'm often very sarcastic and highly critical of many aspects of our situation in this country. There is a place for all of that in getting people to think differently or getting others to ask a new question or reconsider an assumption but sarcasm and direct attacks work when the audience is already on board. We are cheerleading, we are speaking to our team but if we're trying to reach the other team, we are forced to listen and sometimes empathetically to try to see what their issues often emotional, what are their knowledge gaps and what are their principles? We could use the Iraq or Ukraine wars today as an example, COVID also works but let's look at Ukraine and consider guys like Senator Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham. They're smart guys, I mean, you know, I think. They like the constitution, I presume. What kinds of questions about their position on killing Russians and Ukrainians would be most likely to cause them to learn something?  It's better to find a place where you are respecting something that they believe is important and go from there. So I like these TikTok videos of a Texas trial lawyer, he's named Jefferson Fisher, probably nobody's ever heard of them. Here's a little shout out to Jefferson Fisher. He's gotten a bunch of them but he's got one on how to keep people from becoming defensive and shutting down using three key phrases and they are, I agree, I have learned and that's helpful to know. These terms communicate that you care for your audience, you're listening carefully and that you value their input. He uses these phrases as tools and they are tools in dealing with the Tom Cotton acolyte. We could all agree that with that person that the constitution is the law of the land. We can repeat back something that we have learned from that person, for example, the conflict in Ukraine is about justice for people who live there and anything that you have, that they've also said that is helpful to know or it's not only acknowledged but it opens up space for you to add a bit of your own new information, something that would be helpful for them to know. It's baby steps. But the fact is we are all needed to fight this battle of ideas and most of us need to stay out of jail or supermax to be most effective. Now some of y'all, maybe not, but most of us we need to build the numbers on our team and get the rest questioning themselves and each other. So helping people get out of their own intellectual way, easing their fear, communicating and listening in a way that calms them rather than panics them. All of this is important. The last tip I'd like to share tonight here is to make time in your lives to be intentionally curious. It's number eight on a list of 10 great habits of curious people and it says make time for curiosity. Curious people make time to be intentionally curious. Take one day a month to think forward three years to question your goals and assumptions. Are you doing things you shouldn't be doing? What else might you be looking into? We all need to think about being intentionally curious. It is an antidote to boredom, to anxiety, to panic. It puts us in control. It creates value and because we are human we're made for this. This is natural for humans. Now, if we are willing to be wrong and we listen carefully and we use communication methods that can help others to start thinking and we make time to hone our skills of discovery and try for a fun and curious and knowledge filled life. Well, what are we doing? We're creating a better army and really an unstoppable army to fight the state. I spent a third of my life in uniform and I've used some of the language of war in sharing what I think we all have to do and keep doing. And I believe the language of war and also ideas of peace are appropriate because the modern state sees people not just as livestock or bank collateral but as a dangerous enemy and a deadly threat. History, literature, even movies and music all inform us that the state more often than not is the most powerful destroyer of its own people. And if we accept that to be true we accept also the duty to resist the state, to weaken it and to continually help others to do the same. So that's my message to you. We are looking for clear and concise questions. No comments, no introductions, no anecdotes. Hi, thank you so much for speaking. I was just wondering since you obviously have experience having been on the national scale and foreign policy do you think that there is room for change? Like do you think we can see a significant change towards a more peaceful foreign policy on a national level? Or do you think we need to focus more on whatever the states or we as individuals can do to try to make an impact and help hopefully save lives? My experience is I would have to go with the latter on your question. I think it has to, individuals have to make a difference. You know, what I saw just my little example with the guys I work with, I had a bunch of, I had some guys, when I was looking at the office with special plans and how terrible some of the stuff was happening, it was wrong. It was wrong for us to do it. It was wrong to do that to the American people. It was a wrong war. I had guys that were madder than me about it. My co-workers, a couple had an army colonel, Navy captain, no, a Navy commander, that's one goer captain. And they were my co-workers, I'm sorry. And they were very mad and upset. In fact, I learned stuff from them because they would bring it up how upset they were. And yet, their solution was not to try to change it, probably because they knew it couldn't be, they couldn't. And what they did is they called their assignments officer, one in the Navy and one in the Army. And they said, get me out of here. And that's what happened. And they got a new assignment. They got out before they got tempted to change something and get fired. And these people all, I think they all had families, their kids are high school age, getting ready to go to college.  And also it's not just about Washington, about losing your job, retired military people go the next day into a civilian position or they go even better into like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, you know, the revolving door. And these are very, not entrepreneurial jobs, but they're very good ways to make a lot of money. I mean, if you just like money and for the sake of money, you can do that. But they knew better, they knew that one person, two people, even 10 people, the ideology that grips the state, it really is not very tolerant of people with good ideas on how we might do something different, especially peace, because peace doesn't enrich them like war enriches them. And maybe they are entrepreneurs and I didn't know it, but yeah, it has to be the people. And of course, to some extent, even though our democracy, whatever you wanna call it, oh, I vote for somebody, I have a senator, I have a congressman, well, you probably do have a senator and a congressman, you can talk to them, but they do listen. Those guys are more likely to listen. And I think, I was talking to Lou at dinner, not too long ago, a couple months ago, they had a vote in the house and they said, let's pull the troops, let's bring troops back from Syria. They shouldn't be there, by noses, it wasn't even a large amount of 500 troops and of course they're guarding oil, whatever, but bring them back. And 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, there was almost the exact same number of Democratic and Republican representatives, all said, yeah, hell yeah, let's do it. And then the other 300 Democrats and Republicans all said, oh no, can't do that, and that's what it is. But the very fact that there was a vote, the very fact that we know who voted yay and nay on that is a sign that what you think, what people think is important, it does trickle up a little bit, but if you think you can just make it change, the whole system is very sick. It's a sick system, I don't see where a savior of a particularly eloquent Liberty guy up there could make that kind of change. And they have many ways of destroying and silencing people.  They can shut down, you look at them cross-eyed and they'll make sure that you're not in a position to have that attitude spread around. So yeah, don't think that there's any solution up there. It's all from us. Okay, I went too long on that. I'll try to be more concise. Hi, so kind of building off that, assuming that we can actually affect change in our foreign policy without the complete dissolution of the United States, do you think our withdrawal should be a more immediate action of fully pulling out all of our military bases very quickly or do you think it needs to be more of a slower protracted process so we don't destabilize geopolitics? And also, within that new policy, would we still hold some of our defensive allies? Like, if China were to invade Taiwan, would you say that the U.S. should be involved in its defense as that would be, maybe could be seen as more of a defensive, but it wouldn't be the same as like some of the more hard line, not necessarily isolation, it's just more focused on just protecting the continental U.S. itself. Yeah, well, you got a lot in there. You got a lot in there. That's a lot. There's an assumption that our bases overseas have something to do with our defense and they don't, okay? So if you care about defense, you would actually go to the position of sooner, like now, yesterday, get them home, because at least if they're home, they're in a position to defend whatever that means. But we don't, as Americans, we don't hear that. We go, oh, we got a great military, it's in all these countries. Of course they don't actually, they've caught on to people don't want to hear how many countries they're in because that confuses them. Like what, what? And so they're trying to, they don't really emphasize that, but it's all called defense and they do emphasize that it is defense and yet it's none of it's defense. We had, I recall, and I'm sure you did too, a balloon floated over. And it didn't, okay. And then some of the stories that came out as a result of it is that don't worry, they do that all the time. Okay, that's fine. I don't care. And it wasn't a spy balloon and who cares, right? But it might have been something dangerous.  Well, we don't have any, we do not, our military does not defend. It does not defend Americans abroad. It doesn't defend them at home. It doesn't defend our territorial borders. Doesn't defend our natural resources. I think the Pentagon is the number five largest polluter just on its own of, you know, carbon producer.  And that may be a strategy. I mean, that may be something we could do. But so we can't confuse those guys overseas. So my answer would be, yeah, we need to take them. I mean, it's not gonna destabilize because what they're doing over there is actually designed to destabilize. And you know, the government state has always used, my whole life that I've been paying attention to it, they've always, oh, it's stability is so important. Stability is so important. And then you look at the actual impact in the way we do business and the constant lies and dealing and back dealing and everything else that we do. And it's all geared towards instability. Even if we got a guy, it's our own guy up there. We keep the weapon of instability at any moments in case he decides to not do what we tell him. So that's not defense. And it's not in the interest of American people. And so yeah, they should come home immediately. And all these people say, oh, we'll look at Afghanistan. We brought him home and it was a disaster.  You know, I just don't, I don't know. Now you covered something else. Oh, Taiwan, we'll see. To me, that makes no sense.  If indeed China is a rising malicious global imperial looking power, which it is not right now. Okay, it's not. Not anybody long shot. It isn't. But let's just say in a neocon fantasy, it's going to be that someday. What best position should you have? Not go over near backyard and get stomped because that is what will happen and also cause a lot of damage. Just protect what's ours. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know if we have a republic. I don't think we do. I think we're an empire. But I think the empire is failing. And so if we do go back to more simple Republican, smaller Republican type values, I don't think we need a biggest military. That's in my opinion. But certainly it should be defending. It should be working on that. And it can't, it cannot do it. It cannot do it.  It's not, it's not, it's not defending anybody, not even doing its job when we say here, go defend Ukraine. It doesn't work well. It's very expensive, too. A lot of resources could be, you know, better used. Obviously, in my opinion, they should be in private hands, those resources. But even if you're crazed out socialist, you know, you could still agree that those resources could be used somewhere in a better way. But I don't think I answered all of your questions because they had, like, five parts. Is it all right? Yeah, that's just a common argument. We are all out of time. Let's give here a final applause, please.


Hey guys, all right, so I'm Martin. I was one of the co-founders of this Sierra I'm now the CTO of networking for VMware and the focus of this talk is You know, we've been doing network virtualization as a community now for five six seven years And so I want to talk about not just what network virtualization is but kind of like how now that people have adopted it how they're pushing it into do new things and and And I Would like to step back and actually just talk a little bit about disruptive technologies in general So like as technologists We like to look at like the full extent of new technologies right something like virtualization I think we immediately go to things like cloud But like you know our ability as technologists to see how powerful Disruptive technologies are and the market's ability to consume it are entirely different right so even in the case of compute virtualization When like when like VMware for example first came out They would take you know compute virtualization and they would sell it on these very very simple principles, right? So like the early sales pitch For compute virtualization was server consolidation. It's about as simple as you can get right So you'd walk into a customer you'd be like listen if you run VMware or if you run virtualization and instead of buying You know two physical servers you buy one physical server and you save money and that was that was it and When you have very simple kind of pitches It's much easier for technologies to get adopted It just is very difficult to go against kind of like the conventional practices of a company And it's all has to do with sales and go to market however Once technologies get adopted Then it kind of captures the imagination and once they're in place you normally especially virtualization You have like this like the proverbial level of indirection and computer science and you can take advantage of that position to do really cool stuff right and so for example in the case of Server virtualization we started out with this really simple value proposition of server consolidation Then you end up with cloud and all of the benefits that we see now And so what I would like to talk about is like I believe network virtualization is following the same type of trend Which is originally adoption was kind of around these very simple use cases But now that it's been you know Adopted put into practice and used at scale We're starting to see use cases that I certainly never imagined early on when we were developing this stuff And so the way that I have split up this talk is to talk in two pieces So the first piece I want to I just want to focus on background If you guys have heard me talk before or if you've heard talks about network virtualization a lot of this will be Known to you, but I think it's good to get on the same page So you just have to indulge me for the first part of the talk. I'm going to do background and Then I want to talk about kind of how this is evolving as technology in a purely technical sense To use cases again that we hadn't thought about on the outset Okay So let me start so what is network virtualization? Many of you know this but just to get everybody on the same page. I want to go through it again So in a data center, I'm going to step through an animation really quickly So in a data center you have physical switching gear and in the case of network virtualization from the edge It doesn't matter what switching gear you have whether you have You know standard traditional vendor gear whether you have a simple L3 ECMP fabric on a white box If you have IP over in finnaband you have whatever physical network that you have in place I'll assume that it has IP connectivity So of course connected to the switches you've got servers and in a virtualized data center on the servers You'll run a hypervisor and in that hypervisor has a v-switch so v-switches in Virtualized data center today already handle every packet Right or at least every packet between the VM and another VM and the VM and the server, right? This is a software layer that will handle every packet and so the idea of Network virtualization I'm going to use an analogy to server virtualization So from the v-switches network virtualization creates what you can think of as a network hypervisor so Let me just draw on the analogy with compute virtualization. So what is compute virtualization? So compute virtualization is a thin software layer that runs on the hardware that exposes a Virtual machine abstraction and that becomes the focal point of operations right now instead of operators dealing with sheet metal and wires It's dealing with you know a software abstraction that has an API. It's full soft state. I mean all the standard stuff that you know So virtual networking does basically the same thing independent of who builds the system is it creates this layer that exposes virtual networks So virtual networks, I mean these are implemented in software at the edge. They look like physical networks Right, so they have all of the standard interfaces of physical networks They'll support L2 and L3 and ingress ACLs and egress ACLs and L4 through 7 services like firewalling or whatever I mean they look like physical networks so they can support existing workloads But they have the operational model of a VM which means I can create them dynamically I can grow them and shrink them and move them and clone them and snapshot them and Of course this works out, you know modifying or touching the hardware. I mean that's the whole point is you know You already have servers. You already have these switches if you can leverage this position Now you can create another operational abstraction so that you can automate the entire data center including the networking portion Generally these are implemented in some sort of an overlay. It's a mechanistic. I mean that that's that's an underlying mechanism generally whether it's DX LAN or NVG re or STT normally the way that you decouple the address space from the virtual view From the physical view is you use some sort of a tunneling But from the perspective of a user or this perspective of a CMS like OpenStack What's exported is a virtual machine or virtual network abstraction That's kind of the net new right that's that's like just like a hypervisor exposes a VM It exposes a virtual network abstraction And like I mentioned before you want this to be complete because the goal is is if you're going to be creating an operator abstraction and software You want to be able to support all existing workloads and Hopefully existing tool sets as well when it comes to things like provisioning and management and so forth So for example in a standard virtual network, you'll have L2 like I said, so this is basic L2 switching You'll support L3 routing often a virtual networking solution will support dynamic route advertisements to the physical network So it just looks like an extension of physical network So for example if things move around in the virtual L3 domain, it'll advertise and update the physical network to say things have moved Sport things like load balancing firewall and gateways and so forth. So that's it. That's the focal point of abstraction So like I mentioned before when it came to compute virtualization We had this idea early on of like, okay, what you know, what's the simple use case? Right and that was server consolidation and for network virtualization We kind of had to come up with the same type of thing which is And I think I think we tried everything like early on like we're like oh op-ex and like that was very difficult to argue about because like You have to change You know, I mean there's an educational hurdle or maybe cap X But that's actually very difficult to argue about and so now five years later having seen this I can say that the primary driver for the adoption of network virtualization in the last five years. Oh actually It is so the primary driver to adoption is agility, which is the ability to To provision things really quickly So let me give you like a real high level view of how to think about network virtualization at kind of the the techno conceptual perspective Like if you zoom back as far away as possible and you take a Abstracted view of a data center. Here's the best way to think about network virtualization So if you look at modern sass data centers think of like the googles or You know any kind of online site. There's this common characteristics in many of the modern ones, which is The physical network has become very very simple Like a very simple L3 ECM P fabric and Then things that have typically been in the network things like ACLs security Fault isolation things that we've actually found within the network have actually migrated into the application And they're being rebuilt as part of the application, right? This is something that's happened over the last 10 years has nothing to do with VMware has nothing to do with OpenFlow or Nasir or SDN. This is just like Darwin speaking on how you build good data centers And what Darwin has said is like if you build very simple physical fabrics, and you put functionality and software You get a lot of benefits, which are really obvious to people that do software, right? So instead of having to manage You know CLIs through scripts I now have objects That I can that I'm programming and controlling directly because I've decoupled features from hardware There's clearly in a capex play here and and more importantly like the closer you are to the application the more semantics you have Right, you're not guessing anymore if if I'm re-implementing a piece of security As part of my application. I know something that's much higher level. I'm doing it at the right layer It's just like a basic Use of the end-to-end principle And so I mean of the you know I've worked with some now You know a few hundred of these kind of new data centers, and I would say some large percent of them say You know 60 70 percent are actually built in this way, which is very different than what we think of for traditional data centers But the problem is is the only way to build this is you have to control the app and sometimes you have to control the platform So if I control my application and I control my platform I can do all of these neat tricks, right? I can implement security I Can implement my own types of discovery? I can let my old types of failover and load balancing like all of this stuff I can implement as part of the application and it's great But if I don't own the app and it hasn't been written to support that this no longer applies And what I like to say is actually having worked with a lot of these kind of large SAS data centers It's actually interesting if you compare like the op models and the cost models between like their web presence and their internal IT So if you look at like what they've built for like the website You know for like the website like the software that is the service the primary function of the data center. It's awesome Right. It's like everything's in software. It's decoupled from the hardware It's got all the benefits I talk about but then if you look at the IT It's often exactly the opposite you still have all of the problems that you have a normal IT It takes a long time to provision things. It takes a long time to configure things, right? So just because you know how to build this for a new type of application doesn't mean that you can take that knowledge And then somehow move it into the problem of enterprise provisioning Okay, so if you compare This kind of modern SAS data center to the problem of traditional enterprise provisioning a traditional data center If you look at a lot, especially in the enterprise So the network is where you stick a lot of stuff for a good reason, which is a central point for having that stuff Right.  This is stuck in the physical network as Part of the physical network and then you can now run applications unmodified So if you do a comparison on like an OPEX CapEx side Yes, it's not as nice of a model, but it's great from the perspective of I've already got trained guys working on this And it works for every workload So the high-level idea if you want a high-level mental model for network virtualization, which is okay Can we do kind of the best of both worlds somehow? Which is you can use any application any OS hypervisor But then we'll have a thin layer that actually reproduces networking and software And then you can have any type of hardware that you want Which is can you provide the ability to build kind of OPEX CapEx type for a modern data center for traditional IT and having that model So that's that's kind of the high-level idea and what's nice is if you ever get to a point where you're kind of having these kind of like You know performance scaling type questions, and you're not sure whether the architecture works You can always go back to kind of the SAS model where it does work Right, so it's very clear that you can do this because this is done all the time by the most successful data centers on the planet So at an architectural standpoint Clearly you can do this at the world, you know in the high-level world of trapezoids and circles You can definitely do this now the question is is can you do this in a way that's consumable by IT? okay, so You know we've had I mean there's been various production deployments of network virtualization whether it's kind of open-source plugins whether it's Products for quite a while, and I've you know been tracking this for a while, and I think that You know even though we've had like a few Strong production deployments in a while like this is the year where like everybody seems to be going into production So in 2010 I think people thought we were totally nutty We were a little in 2011. I think there was general consensus that you could probably do this But between 2011 and 2012 a lot of people didn't want to be the first one to stand in front of the bullet But over the last couple of years we've actually seen a lot of production deployments Which is really cool from a technologist perspective because now we're like okay finally we got like we got something in it's a core platform It's a core technology now. What can we do to like extend the state of the art right like? Virtualization is an indirection point. It's not just about making things fast. It's about like using that as leverage to change the laws of physics That's what virtualization does right? It's like it allows you to like stand outside of something if you have network virtualization in then we can do it We can actually push use cases that you couldn't do otherwise that if you didn't have that level of indirection So that's what I want to talk about for the last half of my talk I already mentioned this which is the primary use case is agility So let's talk about going forward. Okay, so the first one is visibility and debugging. So in my opinion Virtualization kind of broke visibility and debugging which it wasn't really good to begin with so in virtualization You've got two problems, you know the v-switch like sucks in a bunch of the network Which traditionally you didn't have visibility into but more so just because virtualization decouples compute from location if VMA Can't talk to VMB you kind of have to find out where they are Maybe it's not that hard clearly. We've got tools that allow you to do this But in my opinion network virtualization actually provides the right abstracted model For visibility, so let me try and let me try and argue that so network virtualization is Not new as a concept. We've had virtualization primitives and networking forever We've had Vlands. We've had VRFs. We've had MPLS.   This is the difference between like virtualizing memory and CPU and storage independently and having a virtual machine, right? Networking has always been this kind of mismatched collection of virtualization primitives So if you look at a modern Data center and you try and do visibility debugging you've got one very complex network That's all of these virtualization primitives kind of mixed and matched If you use something like network virtualization The way that I like to think of it is instead of having one very complex network With no clear abstractions. You've got n networks You've got the physical network will call it network zero and then you've got networks one through n Which are the virtual networks and all of them will support standard tools and Standard interfaces, so if a can't talk to be you take your SNMP sniffer and you pointed at virtual network that they're connected to and then If it's a physical problem you take the same tools and you apply it to the physical problem to the physical network Okay, so that kind of gets us back to where we are But I actually believe that you can go with network virtualization because you're at the edge I think you can go way beyond what we can do today And so this is one of the pet projects that I'm working on actually all of the ones I'm going to talk about are pet projects. I'm working on so they're kind of deer and deer to my heart But let me start on this one. So this is actually a Dashboard for our internal open-stat cloud that we use for development and for labs and all sorts of stuff This is VC ops, which is a it's a VM or tool I'm just using VC ops to show you like the virtual networking system. I work on what's exposed as an API Nothing. I'm talking about is specific to product. I just want to talk about network virtualization in general These are just slides to kind of provide a Visual demonstration of what I'm talking about so on the left. Those are virtual networks We've got I don't know 10,000 of them or something like that and every one of these has a different topology So it could be L2. It could be L3 you could have low balance or firewalls. It's all sharing the same physical infrastructure If the dot is green Things seem to be pretty good. If the dot is red. There's a connectivity issue and the dot is yellow There's some threshold that was crossed and I'll talk about that in a second On the right you actually have the topology for actually I'm not you probably can't see but one of these was actually showing the virtual topology And then right below that is all of the things we track things like whatever it's latency rx counters tx counter so forth And this is like network-wide And so for a lot of the a lot of the The clouds that I've worked with like the way to determine if there's a problem as you wait for the phone to ring Right. It's actually very difficult to determine if there is an issue But the idea is because you own the edge and you see all traffic going over and you have to monitor this anyways And you have an overlay. There's no reason why you can't proactively check all of the stuff and monitor it in real time There's no reason why I can't give you like a full dashboard and this is independent of a virtual network system You have of the entire system Not only that you should be able to like map from this virtual realm down to the physical realm So let's say you're like, okay I'm having a latency issue here where my latency has gone up and I don't know why There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to then map down to the physical world and ask questions about the physical world Like which paths is it taking so actually for example this picture on the bottom is a heat map of the physical fabric Again, we have to maintain all this state anyways. That's what virtualization is. I mean virtualization is always this like I've got a It's actually always an array right you know It's like I've got like a physical address space and I've got virtual address spaces that mapped onto it in real time And I have to maintain that mapping so I already have it whether this is virtual memory or file system I have all of the translations that I need and I'm monitoring all of those so I can provide you a global view of them Whether it's for the physical address space or the virtual address space And so this picture is to demonstrate that you should be able to drill from virtual view down to physical view and then the opposite from a physical view up to a virtual view and you should have full fidelity like the ability to see all of the counters and all of the bytes at the right level of abstraction and Like the ability to piece together a global view is is very difficult networking because you have difficulties with global consistency Right like networking is built around eventual consistency. It's very difficult to be like here's my network state at time x And this is not something networking has had traditionally in the distributed consistency model It's always been like well if something changes and after a period of time, I'll give you an answer But while it's changing you never have consistent views virtual networking you have to maintain this array You have to maintain virtual the physical mapping it has to be consistent so that can become the basis of any sort of visibility Okay, here's another one of my pet projects performance optimization via elephant detection Okay, very quick data center theory Okay, so in in a data center most of the time when people measurement measure it The vast vast vast majority of flows if you're looking at flows are small and we call them mice The vast majority of packets are Actually in large flows and those are called elephants So the classic example is mice are often these kind of real latency sensitive bursty things and then someone will migrate a VM or do a backup or transfer a file So this is actually one of the biggest performance issues in data centers is this dichotomy and let me explain why there's actually two problems the first one is TCP is really good at filling buffers. That's what it was designed to do And so if you have a very long lived flow it likes to fill buffers and so end-to-end you'll have all of these nice buffers filled Now if you've got very latency sensitive traffic and it's going through the same path It's going to take all of the queuing delay Right, so now if I have something very latency sense of it sharing the same buffer like anything That's kind of interactive or latency sensitive is actually going to become a performance problem very classic problem in data centers It's called elephants trampling on mice The second problem is mice are bursty They're very bursty. They're so bursty. You can't do anything smart with them You can't adaptively write in that route mice if you do if you're like trying to do something smart with them Like adaptive routing like by the time you've made a decision is probably no longer relevant Which is why almost everybody relies on ECMP multipathing If you do hash-based multipathing is stateless it uses randomization and you're always within a factor of two of optimal So that works great for mice for mice hash-based multipathing fantastic for elephants. It's horrible Because since you don't have any knowledge about the elephants and there aren't very many of them The algorithm can map two to the same link and now you've underutilized your fabric So these are the two problems with elephants and mice right you introduce latency and then you can suboptimally use the fabric So there's all sorts of proposed solutions for this right like and they're all really simple If I can identify elephants and mice throw them in separate queues. I've solved the latency issue I'll just use DSCP, but just for code point. That's easy I'm going to continue to use hash-based multipathing on mice because I can guarantee that's near optimal And for the elephants I'll actually do something smart like I will route them per flow and make sure that they don't share the same length Good I can oh Oops, this is wrong. So I should be able to turn elephants into mice not mice and elephants So one thing I could do is I could take the elephants and I actually could split them up by modulating the ephemeral port and turn them Into mice you have reordering issues But like modern-day TCP stacks are good with reordering like modern-day sack is actually pretty good with the reordering so maybe you don't care and Another one that's actually comes up a lot is like you know what I'm gonna have a different I'm gonna use a leaf spine architecture and in my spine I'm gonna have an optical spine that I'm gonna send all my elephants to so the mice will stay on my normal network and my elephants I'm gonna send on an optical spine So these are all good suggestions, but the problem is is traditionally a networking. It's very difficult to detect elephants very difficult to detect elephants fortunately, this is something that's very simple in in You know virtualized network environments, and so open v-switch is a project near and dear to my heart It's actually done per flow tracking forever like since the very beginning So there's no reason that you can't use the v-switch to track all of the flows and then based on either operator input or throughput tracking actually Detect whether something is an elephant and signal that to the fabric so you either mark it say say we decide this DSCP bit means elephant you can mark it on the packet or You can actually signal the fabric and say I've identified an elephant and here's the five tuple It's very very this is very difficult to do in hardware because of SRAM density issues. It's very easy to do in software on the edge And so we're working on on a project right now. It's total kind of skunk works fun Thing that that I'm just interested in doing which is within open v-switch exposing a column OVSDB which is all the heavy hitters that you have network-wide So for every for every server here's all your heavy hitters And we'll just use throughput as the metric to determine it and then you can have something like a centralized SDN controller of your favorite choice We'll go and we'll Network-wide globally will list like say the top 10 or the top five or whatever you want And that can actually signal to to the physical network to say here's an elephant do something smart with it Or just throw it in separate cues or whatever you decide to do make sense The bottom line is this is kind of been like one of these sticky problems and networking for a really long time and either you know What your elephants are or you're kind of screwed and like I think that there's a chance here because of the semantics We have in the edge and because we're in software in the edge We don't have SRAM density issues that we can actually solve it All right, so finally I'm going to talk a little bit about policy This one's gonna be a little bit more philosophical in nature So I talked about I think I think we can actually extend the state of the art and visibility and management I think we can really extend to the state of the art in performance in networking I think we can actually change the way you do networking Policy is a lot broader than networking, but it's a great place to have the discussion. So let me just describe So what is policy? So policy is just business logic applied to systems things like We never put apps from different BU's on the same network, right? These are things that people come up with that are written in documents That come from human beings that are applied to systems. That's what policy is and if you look at most Policy systems, they're generally a subset of data log Meaning you've got condition action just like sequel most policy engines look like this, right? So you're like, you know if if the user is martin and you know It's before 10 a.m. Then go ahead and the log the traffic because he never gets up that early, right? This is basically What policy systems do and they're almost always declared over site specific Namespaces and logic right it depends on the site So I got into this whole area actually from the policy side That's what I used to do is policy and the problem is in networking The way that you write policies you've got some policy That goes with policy compiler policy compilers kick off a connectivity matrix But mapping from that output to a physical network reduces to the network virtualization problem Right So this is totally not obvious to me early on but it actually reduces to the network virtualization problem Like if I have a connectivity matrix it assumes Effectively a flat network and if I'm mapping it down to an apology with enforcement points I have to solve the network virtualization problem. That's why most policy compilers either sock or they will constrain your topology heavily Or they will expose the topology up in the policy space, which is not what you want if I if I'm writing a document with a policy I don't want to declare it over a topology. I want it to be totally independent because it's a business thing Now this has been the state of policy for a very long time if you have something like Network virtualization you expose this idealized view for the policy compiler to write to so I have my high-level policy compiler I can write any sort of policy I want I compile it down to this Kind of platonic view this virtualized view and then the virtualization layer then maps it down to the physical topology And if any change happens in the physical network or whatever that's handled by the virtualization layer So now we can build these kind of real robust policy compilers like high-level integrate with ADL DAP Like like actual data log language compilers that will manage an entire network Like I think I can like manage all connectivity in an entire network from like one language spec But I think that you have to solve the network virtualization problem to do that Otherwise you end up trying to solve it in the compiler, which is too difficult So I actually think this is very important because policy is something you can't really automate away It's something that all users must use and so I think what's really important from a policy standpoint is that you've got broad ecosystem Meaning you know we so we go say we go through all of this efforts to to do open stack We automate away the provisioning interfaces You've disaggregated software from hardware and everybody's happy if you slap a policy Language on top of that that's from like say a hardware vendor or or even a software vendor that likes vertical integration and then It that since that's the top part of the stack You can now vertically integrate the entire stack through it And I actually think that the next big strategic battleground is around policy for exactly this reason So I think it's very important when we talk policy governance should be open totally open I think ecosystem should be totally huge and there's no IP and policy There's like we all know the technology here. There's nothing you are interesting So the most important thing is that we have an open governance model Which I think is why open stack is such a great forum for these policy discussions It's nice because there's a whole bunch of them happening There's one that we're gonna have on Wednesday at 440 Unfortunately, I'm actually in a couple hours going to Tokyo so I can't be there But many people will be there and I really encourage you to go and I'm basically Out of time. I don't think I've been have time for questions. So I think I'll end it there. So thanks so much guys


I am honored by this invitation to join you all this afternoon to commemorate the first anniversary of the James Adequaleo Jelabi Foundation and to inaugurate the Foundation's Nigeria History Fund. My brother and friend Pastor Jelabi and the other visioners of this foundation deserve our commendation and our congratulations. When the federal government decided to reintroduce history into the curriculum across primary and secondary schools last year, it was a decision born out of the recognition that first our children must know where they are coming from and have an understanding of the life that preceded them. History is far too essential for us to de-prioritize. It encourages us as individuals to not restrict ourselves to thinking in the short term, but to remember that we too are living histories. Second, that we cannot sure-footedly chart a course forward without understanding where we are coming from. Vision is important, but so too is memory. Nation building requires us to develop both faculties of imagination and remembrance. Historians and all of us who answer the call to interrogate the past bear a special responsibility as custodians of national memory. Indeed, this stewardship of national memory is a cardinal civic obligation. So the importance of recollection is embedded in our national anthem which asserts and I quote that the labors of our hero's past shall never be in vain, end of wood. Obviously this imposes a burden on us to remember and study those labors and memorialize the lives of the heroes that accomplish them. Knowing that we are standing on the shoulders of giants is crucial to national and individual self-esteem. Also, our diversity as a nation is a unique strength. However, we cannot realize the full potential of this strength without a thorough understanding of the different cultural practices and social norms that make up the mosaic of our nationhood. The future of Nigeria that works for all of us regardless of religion or ethnicity depends on a full and accurate knowledge of our histories. We are blessed to belong to a nation that possesses such a rich history of art, of technology, of trade, of political administration, among many fields of human endeavor. But this bountiful inheritance is often under-explored and under-appreciated. History is a vast reservoir of cultural, spiritual and social capital waiting to be mined by a generation that will not neglect the ancient landmarks of our odyssey as a people. Whilst our ethnic diversity, as I pointed out, is a great strength, one of the biggest challenges to national building is this same ethno-religious diversity which can also engender detrimental social conflict as we've seen all in different parts of the country at various times. Now if you look at our history, especially pre-colonial history, you will find that in fact many heterogeneous groups in pre-colonial Nigeria live together relatively harmoniously. In many areas there were deep trade relations, cultural exchanges and well-traveled migration routes between ethnic groups. The evidence of such sociocultural cross-pollination can be found in our languages, in our cultural norms, in our practices and traditions which have evolved over the course of several generations. Even the linguistic styles and the cognitive structures that have survived history are a testament to a profound degree of intercultural communication which predated the advent of colonialism. History is an impeccable teacher. In its lessons it gives us hope and also shows us what is possible. A deep dive into the history of these intergroup relations in our past is an illustrative reminder that in spite of our diversity it is possible and most desirable for us not only to coexist but to work together for a common goal of peaceful nation building. Nigeria will soon celebrate 60 years of independence from colonial rule and even 60 years of colonial and pre-colonial history of immense importance for understanding the role of our nation and her people especially in a global context. The same case can be made for the histories of many former African colonies which as a result of colonialism and the attendant Euro-centricism of global academia we have suffered from having their histories whitewashed, erased and sometimes horrific without our best interest in mind. Too often international history books present us solely as victims of white aggression, bereft of agency and as people whose lives only began at colonialism and independence. Although modern history is also important books like that of James Adepele or Jelabi that have gone as far back as 1008 in their sourcing are a necessary reminder that we were in fact heirs of great societies with sophisticated models of socio-political organization. People and we were and we were very well organized people well before the white line came. Indeed as a scholar, Jelabi strenuously opposed the view of African history as consisting only of a record of European imperialist colonial activities in Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries. He described the portrayal of African history in these terms as I quote and I quote. It described that portrayal of African history in these terms as the height of intellectual dishonesty and this indignation inspired his historical writings the impact of which has endured for 50 years. Reclaiming our past will fortify our recognition of the key role we have played in global history and break free from the shackles of the colonial views of the continent. As black people, as Africans, as Nigerians who must reclaim our histories and nurture academic environments that make that possible. Chinua Achebe whose writings were rooted in profound historical consciousness famously said and I quote, until the lions have their own historians the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. End of quote. So decolonizing perceptions and reappropriating our historical inheritance is essential to recovering our sense of agency our purpose and our mission in the world. Our children must know that they belong to countries that they can be proud of so that they can stand tall in the face of people who may tell them a different story. Given the size of our diaspora as well, the pertinence of history runs beyond just our borders. A recent study illustrated that an overwhelming number of African-Americans have Nigerian ancestry. This knowledge is not entirely new but it serves as a reminder for just how important our history is not just because it is ours but because also it is the history of millions of people worldwide where part of something much bigger and history helps us to put that in context. So far our historical research on the continent often requires going against the grain to unlearn false histories that have been propagated about us so that we can write and record them in our own voices, reviving excluded perspectives and posthumously giving voices to the voiceless. Although a difficult task it is, it's a most necessary one and the sacrifices that historians make in the carrying out of their research studies is ultimately for the betterment of us all. This is why this Nigeria History Fund is a fitting celebration of the life of one of Nigeria's foremost historians, James Adekunio Gelabi, whose books on West African history were so popular that they've been included on curricula across the region and many of us today have read those textbooks, especially those of us who are students of history and many today are still reading those textbooks. A song for whom so much of his life was dedicated to ensuring that the stories of our past were given the attention they rightly deserved, supporting history students with a scholarship scheme is a very thoughtful tribute to his legacy. I'm also delighted to hear that the fund will keep conversations alive about the importance of history for modern day Nigeria as we also go about writing our own legacies and living out our own histories like the late James Adekunio Gelabi did. May the works of our own hands also be connected to a broader national goal. This departed historian will long be remembered for his enlightening history books that ultimately transformed and are still transforming how Nigerians see themselves in the world. His books showed us as a nation where we must not make the same mistakes. May we take heed, may we never lose the zeal to explore these new areas of historical curiosity and also that we never underestimate the immense value of Nigeria's history for us and the rest of the world. We owe it not only to the late Adekunio Gelabi but most importantly to our children, our next generation of nation builders. So while I commend again all the effort that has gone into setting up this foundation, I congratulate all the visioners and I congratulate all of us that were able to participate in this very important ceremony and especially to celebrate a year since the foundation came into being. I thank you very much. God bless you.