Spotify is taking advantage of artists. They don't really care if you're somebody who feels like that and you're not getting your worth, your value from these streaming platforms. We have a proposed solution from the Joe Budden podcast on how you should be using your streaming strategy to make yourself richer and taking advantage of Spotify instead of letting them take advantage of you. We're gonna talk about this strategy and how we think it could work out. The discourse around this was crazy on Twitter. It was going viral. This is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary. Relying on streaming as an income source is an impossible reality, unless you are the kind of the time with it. Relying on streaming as an income source is impossible. It's less, it's more possible than I feel like most people think, but let's play the whole clip. You can do something where it's like, I put it on streaming for a short time and then I take it off and sell only. Like that's the commercial. Yeah, that is on streaming for a month, excuse me. But after that month, I'm pulling it. And now if you want it, you have to purchase it. That's the only way to get it. We already tried that. They already tried that? Yeah, but you remember the exclusive days? That's what I was thinking. This is the reverse exclusive model. Remember they used to start with exclusives and then put it on Spotify. Even saw Jay-Z do stuff like that where he started on Tidal for years and then put some stuff on Spotify. Apple, the Apple chance to rapper deal, he started on Apple and then put it on Spotify. Frank Ocean. That's the typical, right? Exactly, Frank Ocean. But then you got the reverse. I'm gonna put it out there and then if you wanna continue to consume it, then you gotta pay me, right? You gotta come behind my paywall, my Patreon, whatever. That's the idea. Now there's a lot of discourse around this and I think we're gonna get deeper into business models and things you need to consider in terms of how you wanna handle this situation than any other episode we have so far. So please listen if you really take your career seriously because I think there's only a lot of things to think about here, like for real, for real. Because I love the conversation that this had but there's a couple of realities that I think some people don't consider in this. So one, one thing that I think is gonna be beneficial on the positive side because we're gonna go for and against. I think the pros and cons. On the positive side, I'll start. What we probably would see is for people who do have a fan base, they would get more streams in that period of time, right that month than they normally would because of the scarcity aspect. Let me listen as much as possible before I know it's gonna be gone. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I didn't think about that. That would be interesting, right? And then in terms of teasers and things like that, but then that's if you put the whole song out there to the teaser, not just a snippet of the song, because that's weird. We already got social media for that. You can't do that. Yeah, and song's gonna be long enough to do that. What you mean? Well, like we're talking about the snippet would need to at least be 31 seconds, you know what I'm saying? To count and to get the algorithmic push. You know, a lot of songs that they'd be like two minutes, maybe two and a half. So you're talking about a quarter of the song and the snippet's like that point might as well have put the whole thing out. Yeah, so getting into the details of this, right? Different business models and how people actually think around this. Here's a comment from Kennedy Clark. He said, and shout out to Curtis King, by the way, because he was where I first saw these posted on Twitter. Then I started seeing it pop up everywhere else. The biggest roadblock to this is how phones are set up now. Streaming is convenient while buying songs and then listening to those songs requires so many steps it's a turn off to listen to them. Facts, facts, I think, facts. Hey man, I think I speak for all of the lazy music fans out there, you know? I like to think of myself as lazy music fan representative.  Like I remember what it was like to download songs and buy songs and that two or three extra steps versus me just popping open Spotify and the quick searching that comes up. You can't take that away from me, man. I'm not going for that. Got to think about the people regardless. I think a lot of times we have all these anti-industry sentiments and then think, oh, I'm just going to go over here and do this. But then people get knocked on the head because they realize it's not just the industry itself, all right? A lot of the industry's model is built off of human behavior, the fans. Yeah, fan behavior, yeah. So you're blaming the industry when the industry would like to make more money from the fans too. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't be making more money from what the industry is taking, but trust me, like it's coming from somewhere because other industries and other products are getting more money per stream. You think the industry wants to charge only $12.99 for unlimited songs, right? If they could charge $50.99, you know what I mean? Or $100, like, so some of this constraint is built off of the fans and I think people have to realize that first and foremost. Yeah, nah, I agree with that. It's like artists in the higher label structure, morally on some of those things are fighting the same fight. Like I said, like everybody wants to be paid more. Everybody is wishful thinking, I think at this point because we're so deep into that etch of the human behavior, right? Where it's like, hey, it's not even just the music, right? Like we're seeing this in so many different industries, TV and movies, music, even like sports, probably sound like my TV sometimes, like you can buy like packages of seasons, you know what I'm saying, for like a small fee. So I'm like, oh, everybody is kind of having to bend to the new consumer behavior of like, now I want everything boned up together really neatly and nicely for less than $15 a month or $15 per. And if you can do that, I will consume everything you want to give to me. And if you can't do that, I will leave and go somewhere else. Yeah, I want that infinitely, by the way. Infinite, yeah.  Now I need some more, feed me. It's a crazy beast and it's a model that's unsustainable, nobody's super happy in it, but that's something that has to be considered in these conversations. Because a lot of times I'll go deeper to it like later in this conversation. And we want y'all's comments for this podcast. We really need as much commentary around it, different perspectives, et cetera, let's make this comment section. But those who are watching on YouTube especially, like let's make this one of great substance. I want to hear some ideas that I haven't seen before or what we don't discuss. But artists, it's always like the anti, I know this is like early on, right? For the anti's to exist, they need establishment. One, they need something to push against, right? But also a lot of times you need the structure to then do your own thing, right? So not just to be against like, oh everybody believes this and then now I'm the anti, so I'm counterculture. So there's a need of primary culture to be counterculture, but beyond just the ideals of it, when you talk about functionally, there's a need for structure to be, for the chaos to exist, right? Because everybody can't be in chaos, you know what I mean? So if there's no structured industry and all artists became their own little businesses, the numbers wouldn't pan out like artists think. And what you'll end up finding instead of artists hating the industry, artists will be hating on artists like they're hating on the industry. Like why does his app got 5,000 people? For whatever reason. People will find ways, right? Because then you'll find the people who are more business savvy at the end of the day, the ones who are more business savvy, more connected, personality connected, it's still gonna become something. Artists will begin to click up more, right? Because it's just going to be the model, right? It has to exist, structure will find its way to exist and then there's always gonna be people who aren't a part of whatever the core structure is. And people don't account for that sometimes. It's like, yeah, you would be losing in this other model too, you actually might have a better chance in this model. Cause you aren't LaRussell, you aren't Russ, you get what I'm saying? And I'm not just to say to him that you aren't Nipsey Hustle, you don't have that type of hustle mentality. You just want to create the music? Like boy, if you talk about, there was music industry andarchy out there then just creating the music, you really aren't gonna get the money. Now that's a good point. Cause you made me think about something I hadn't thought about before, right? But you look at the streaming model, right? And the way it's set up is the work and effort of the bigger artist brings attention to the smaller artists, right?  But in the streaming economy, the attention that Kanye brings to his music has potential to trickle over to somebody that's lesser known because of the algorithm and playlisting and things like that. I didn't even think about that. So it's like by separation, you really isolate yourself to whatever you can provide. And we already know artists have an issue with, a lot of artists have an issue with being able to provide the jump start. To get that music out there. It might be one of the few places that trickle down economics does have some pre-clearance, right? Yeah. But on the other end, when you look at that, to do it properly, I saw some platform in the comments and I don't know how much they, because they say they're solving this problem or working on this problem. But to do this properly, because I didn't actually look at what they're doing, you have to have a streaming platform still. It can't be like iTunes or download to my device locally, that type of thing. It needs to be basically Spotify. And then you allow everybody to charge for their money. I mean, charge for their work on the platform, but I'm consuming it out of the same library. So that part still has to say consistent, which means that company would probably be more of a payment processor in terms of their model, all right, versus getting paid per stream. It was like, oh, I paid $5 to listen to your music and then I paid $20 to listen to, I don't know, a Jay-Z track and I paid $50 for this other track, right? Yeah. And then me as a company, I get money from that and you get to get whatever you decide to be worth, which is also gonna be pressed down based on whatever the fans are willing to pay, all right? But from a fan experience standpoint, I get to have it all in this consistent library. That to me is probably the most likely solution, generally speaking, but I still even got thoughts about that, but the point is, why that has to be a thing? We go back to the isolated platform model, right? An isolated platform model, fans aren't trying to pay for another subscription. So people don't wanna pay for more subscriptions now. You think dividing every artist up to their own individual subscription is gonna work. And letting them pick the price? Yes. It's why recurring revenue programs like a Patreon isn't going to work for most artists. It's not gonna, like a paid group or something isn't gonna work for most artists. Why? Because if everybody does that, then now it's too much. But having a few artists do it, so that's the balance. It's like, oh yeah, you have this insert special artist who has their situation moving in one way. I have my, let's say my paid community where I have where you're paying me kind of like a Patreon, right? And they're paying me just for the music, not any extra, like there's gonna be a certain set of artists that can exist because this structure exists. Remember, that's the counterculture to this. There's gonna be some other artists that do all types of unique things, but everybody can't do that.  Yeah, nah, it would literally force music fans who have to physically sit down and figure out who are the artists they'd like enough to wanna support in a way that fans don't really have to think about it that deeply. They don't. I will argue probably 80% of the artists they listen to. Once tour season starts and people start selling merch, you have to kind of make that decision, but in your listening habits, I don't really have to sit down and think like, damn, do I feel like supporting Con Adderdale? Do I feel like supporting Lil' Whoever? But in that model, I have to literally look at, you know what, we're talking about the average streaming platform price as well between like nine and $15 a month. You know what I'm saying? So now, I don't know, if I got a media budget of a hundred a month, you're telling me I can only pick between like six people, you know what I'm saying?  And then somebody new comes along and now I gotta decide who do I wanna bump out to start to be able to support this person? That should be chaos, bro. It'll be terrible. At L.J. The Giant, L.J. The Giant said, as a fan of music, I just buy vinyls and merch to support artists, all right? That exists, that's something we're already doing. I don't think it's a good idea to make things difficult for your average fan to access your music. I still haven't heard Donda 2 and I already have the STEM player, L.O.L. It was just too much of a hassle, in my opinion. I already bought the thing. Still the one, bro. But I can't consume it. And that sounds good. He still paid me money, but low quality experiences on the long tail is gonna stop your money and stop your branding. So I was like, yeah, I bought the STEM player, but I never consumed it. Now you don't get to do all of the things that come from manipulating the people who consume the music, right? Selling them additional things. The concert periods aren't as rich or whatever. Just things are smaller because you gated it. Even if they have the thing, it's harder to experience. That is an additional gait. And I think what people miss, right? We already talked about the fans, right? Being into the funnel. I think, I saw another comment, actually. Here it is. This might generate revenue, but if this was at Pastel East, by the way, ETH. This might generate revenue, but if your goal is impact and longevity, it might work against you. How many Kanye fans have actually heard Donda 2, which was exclusive to the STEM player? That's crazy. They're on two catching strays. It is. Two people in here. This is not them quote to their comment. This is two separate people. And it's a real thing. So this is what I'm saying. People don't realize. I thought about it with Prince earlier. This is like maybe 2006 to 10 or whatever. I was on YouTube in that period listening to all this music. Prince was not on YouTube at all. And I wanted to consume. I mess with Prince already. I had to agree because of what I knew of Prince and my dad would be talking about Prince or all that stuff, shoot from Dave Chappelle, all that. I mess with Prince. But I wanted to hear more of his music to really, really know his music catalog. And I couldn't. I couldn't find it nowhere. And only way to get it was to buy it, buy it. I didn't even know how to buy music, for real. And I never went to figure out how to buy music. I just didn't. And I hated it because I had as much respect for him as I did because I came from such a musical background. But I was like, man, people who don't even know him, they're not gonna have time to discover him. Like the other young people aren't gonna, like after the generations, after he's just gonna like be gone. Not cause he's not good, but because nobody else can discover him and get close to him, past the generation that already rocks with him. Fast four years later, I can't remember if it was before or after he passed, but now he has more stuff that's out on YouTube. He released the catalog, you know, and all that. He was notorious for just getting rid of stuff. So it goes back to that longevity. Like the long till people can experience you, if you're behind this gate, it becomes akin to geographically, basically, to experience you, I actually have to travel to, I don't know, rural Idaho to actually listen to your music. Geographically, on the internet version of that, right? I have to go find this place, go and go this journey to be able to consume you and there's a push and pull. You get more money in the short term. So maybe the mile becomes, I do more, some things out there and I do some things gated. I do something, but not, but to make your entire model gated, there's a reason that this doesn't exist. There's a reason that this does not exist. I promise you, it's so much harder when it comes to the economics. Like these are just basic numbers. Yeah, yeah. And I love the emphasis on the impact, right?  So, I've always looked at the intel of fan consumer behavior is how they react to the music once they hear it, right? So it's like, I think there's a part of a fan's brain that understands like, hey, I'm paying a very little amount of money for this thing that you put so much work into, especially if they really follow you and they, or they follow multiple arts enough to see the work that's put into it. Like I was just telling the client, like, you know, what's so fascinating today is that I will argue that our generation of music fans are the most educated about the music industry than any other generation of music fans. So they have a lot more empathy for music artists, maybe than fans of other years. We're sure, we're sure. And so a lot of times the way they will repay the fan is, hey, now I'm gonna go make TikToks to your music to help you get exposure. Now I'm gonna go make sure I play your song in my car so they're all my friends here while we're going to school. Now I'm going to, you know, I got this school project coming up and I'm gonna use your song for the intro to it because I feel like this is the least I can do.  Because now it's only the select group of people that do buy into it that have to decide to do all those things and we already know. Shit like that is just a numbers game. It might take you hitting 100,000 people just to get 1,000 people to move. So if you now only have 1,000 people to work, now it might just be 10 people moving around, you know what I'm saying, what you have put out there. So now you're shortening your impact on people and shortening the impact they can have on your career. And I do think it's for sure a short-term play, right? Hey, I can cap right now, I can get my money per fan now, but what we're starting to see is that the real money from music comes from catalog building and adjusting fan behavior over a long time, right? How can I take little Timmy that discovered me today and make sure that he's still a fan of me when he's 50 years old, you know what I'm saying? And still got more disposable income. And it's like, if you can't reach a lot of people to make sure that you not only have new people come in that could possibly hit that, but to also cover the people that are gonna leave, right?  It's just, it happens. All of our favorite artists have dropped the song for this matter to go, I don't know, bro, this ain't the one. You know what I'm saying? I'm gonna fall back off you for a little bit. That's a whole pressure that artists don't feel right now where it's like, oh, they're gonna leave me, like watch them cancellations when they don't like this project. Exactly, bro, amen. Y'all ain't never dealt with, what's the shit? Chargeback, bro, when you dealing with a chargeback, a whole different set of issues, bro. So it is like, it's a great short-term play. I do agree with that. But I think it's a terrible long-term play. Cause now, oh my God, bro, it's all coming to me. It's all coming to me when you say it like that too. Because now we talk about artists don't really look at the fact that they're serving fans. We make, they make it so much about them, right? And they don't realize that you're serving somebody in terms of entertainment. They have to enjoy or want to experience this and based on their experience, that is how the relationship continues for bad, good, whatever, that's how your reputation is built. And it's easier with all of this chasm in between, but when it's direct, to that extent, it's pure customer service, baby. Like, bro, like, dog, like you literally are going to feel the brunt, the complaints. It's a whole nother level.  Every single song, the feedback, the chargebacks, the fraud, purchases. They wanted to hear that project real quick. Just to cancel right after or to use somebody else credit card, all them other things. Look, it just is what it is. Like we talking about at scale in that way. It will be very interesting. But to dig deeper into that mentality that I think people are missing out on is this guy right here at my mind said, who wants to pay for the past, LOL?  That doesn't even like, I can't even make that make sense personally. Like, I almost want to say what do you mean? Because if he's just just generalizing, it's like that song already happened or whatever. Like, I don't connect with that because he's like, but that's how fans, there's people out here that are like, that's how they think. And it's a lot of them. It's a lot more that in the same way I talked about the other day where we were going through all these comments and fans didn't have as much empathy as artists would expect because they're like, yeah, we're working something that we don't, like this is a job that I don't like, right? And you're not willing to do content or things like this. Like there's a lot of people when you look through comments that are not artists, they don't understand the artist complaint outside of maybe not getting your value. But once it gets into the finer details of you're not doing X, Y and Z or you won't or the fact that you have to work to get to a position higher to then experience success and more freedom. Like for them, they just don't connect. I'll just leave it at that. Damien Ritter on the other side, he says, these guys clearly don't work with any successful independent artists today that stream well. I'm not advocating for relying just on streaming. You should have many revenue streams, but there are many independent artists that do. Stop taking advice from these podcasts, LOL. All right, Damien. Damien talking, he's coming. Like that was pretty direct. Man, I ain't never seen Damien talk like that, man. I really haven't. Like that. I was like, bro, that should really touch them, bro. Like. And I think for the people who do work with artists and see what they're making from streaming, there's a lot of artists that are doing 5,000 a month, 10,000 a month. Yes, we have those way bigger numbers than people who are making like 75K. I think there was a Nick D video I saw someone say he was making 75K a month. Kind of price was making like 200K a month. All right, we've seen those numbers. And of course, the big, big artists who are signed to label but probably aren't making it all by themselves and busting it down with somebody else, right? But 5K a month off of streaming, and I know some who aren't even going crazy with content that are making that, right? Yeah, facts. Right? That is a reasonable amount of money, right? Now, the amount of money you have to live and then reinvest in career, like it's a tight rope to walk, right? But when we look at these numbers, we kind of experienced some of this. We ain't gonna go too deep in this, but when the Spotify made the announcement about the 1,000 streams, you saw a lot of artists that realized, oh, wait, I'm good. And I don't even understand why you would not be able to hit this number, all right? There's just different levels of this, different divides of artists that are confused or hurt based on whatever the barriers are. That's what we're going to consistently find. So yeah, shout out to Dane because I don't think people realize at how achievable it is to hit some of these numbers. Know nobody should rely on just streaming because streaming hopefully could be a baseline, right? That covers some expenses, but you still need to make money from other places to be able to reinvest in your career, right? It's like nice to be here, but if I can't put more money into growing it, then eventually that streaming is gonna go down. So I gotta keep feeding that beast too. That's the way I look at that. Maybe we need to do like a graph. I feel like we need a whiteboard stuff more often. So a whiteboard? Yeah, I need to, I really need to like draw stuff out for people to see some of the concepts. I think we could do better at some of that, but this is the free-form pod. Dane, shout out to Dane. By the way, Dane, especially shout out to Dane because he's over at Two Loss now. If y'all don't know about Two Loss, they are the distributor, actually one of the few distributors that we're willing to actually talk about on this platform, promote and support. And now they have given us a little bit of support. So we wanna let y'all know a little bit about Two Loss. Okay, let's do it. Two Loss is a distribution platform that has some pretty dope artists on it. They go underground, but they got the pink sweats. I think 070 Shake is over there. It's on the roster. Guys like Lil Mabu over there for those who acquired that taste as well. I just mean, I know you look controversial. Some dope artists over there. But at the same time, we have some of the artists that are our clients and that we work with that have actually had an excellent experience, not from just a regular streaming. They're not a distro kid, right? You have the distro kid, then you have the label services where they're pretty much a label for real doing it for you. They're that nice in between where artists that do want a little bit of help, like help with streaming, help with just navigating the industry and getting real customer service, right? Yeah. At the end of the day, we've seen a lot of dope people. I mean, we have a lot of dope people and quateness that helped us learn. Like, y'all know, this is a dope platform worth supporting because we're seeing our clients like speak pretty highly of it. So if you wanna check out Two Loss, we encourage you to do it at ASAP while we have this free code for you to hop in and just get a feel for what it looks like versus your current platform. We are in support of it. Go put in no label that's N-O-L-A-B-E-L, no S, just no label when you create your profile and you'll be able to hop in for free. Support or at least check out Two Loss because they're supporting people like us and that helps us put out as much free information as possible. Next comment.  That's a horrible idea. Yes, terrible. Well, and I wanted to touch on, it was a comment before because I felt like it tied in this two right words. Which one? The guy said something about like paying for the past. I think I get what he's saying, man. Okay, what does he mean by that? He's basically saying, I am paying to go backwards, right? We've evolved from downloading music. You know, I can't remember the last time I clicked download on a song. Ugh. You know what I'm saying? At least seven to eight years ago, if I really think about it. That's your ick. 100% for a download link? Crazy, bro, don't send me a download link. Send me a streaming link. At least a YouTube link. But it's like, now I have to pay to go back and in the area with no other media form I really pay attention to is forcing me to do it.  I'm good. Download one or two, maybe three apps, and I'm good.  I'm not doing that. I'm too far gone. Like I said, I personally believe I'm the representative of the lazy music fan everywhere. You know what I'm saying?  I get it, bro. Like I said, that only model is the streaming platform that allows people to buy on the platform. Like only fans, right? Like, yeah, basically like only fans and all my only fans profiles are on this same space, right? That model, and then maybe you would encourage some people to be free. Like I'm trying to flesh it out and try to make it make sense, right?  So you can charge your $5 and this person could charge their five and 10 and $100, whatever. Or this person's running a gimmick so they are doing 1,000 or 2,000 or whatever, right? They're running a play. But then maybe most of the artists are building their base, right? So most of them still have their stuff free, right? On the same platform, but you can do a value ladder up, right? So we're all on the same platform. Some people are charging, some people are not. Some people are charging sometimes. So I'm charging for this particular project but I'm not charging it. So it's all in the same space. I can see that working. That's literally the only fans model.  You know what I feel like? Maybe you should do some research, man. You can make us rich. Maybe, man, you know, if I got to do it for the sake of the part, bro, I love traversing new territory for information, man. That's the type of person I am. But you know what I feel like if an artist wanted to really see how well their community could take that. And I'm thinking this in real time. So don't judge me and I ain't seen nobody do it yet. Okay. But Instagram has the subscription feature. Okay. The subscription feature allows you, I believe, to pick from a set amount of prices or you can set your own price. I don't remember which one it is. And for those of you that don't know or maybe don't have access to it yet, the subscription is a feature that Instagram wrote out a couple of months ago where fans can pay for access to your content, right? Now what I think an artist could try if they wanted to see is go, set a price, make a cool little visualizer, almost like a canvas or a nine by 16 visualizer with your song on it, upload it, maybe a couple of songs and see how many people like your fan base will pay for that. Because what makes me think you could get a good gauge is like, okay, I don't have to leave and get a new platform. I can steal, at least be in the platform I already know and like and see. And one I would love somebody to try that.  That's what my heart is pushing me towards. You gotta have a pull to make it work. Yeah, the optimist in me says that you might get like 20 people to do it, you know what I'm saying? But again, it's a sacrifice, it's a short-term and long-term play and I think that's what people have to remember.  Now you have as many people discovering and consuming passively. Wish that money could have been made up, exactly. This person, duck Arkady says great concept, also think your ads on Instagram and Facebook, et cetera should be oriented to aim towards your website as well to whatever it's current. Ah, it depends, we'll get to that actually. There's this other one that's more relevant in breaking things down.  What man? This will, this will work for established artists with a loyal fan base. Mid-sized artists may get a bag in the short-term but may damage their long-term career prospects. And then their new artists should avoid this strategy unless their music is suitable for DJs. I don't quite understand the DJ part. I'll take a moment to process this but I do agree with the first half of that sentence. Should avoid this strategy. They broke it down perfectly. So a lot of times people are saying this stuff and you might see people with fan bases do certain strategies but you're not in that position. You know, since the beginning of this channel basically we've been talking about like don't be busting moves that you're not in position to do. Yes. You know what I mean? If people listening and watching don't take nothing else away from this and we've said this before, right? Streaming platforms are just marketing platforms. Yes. Or they're moving towards being that right. Somebody, even this initial post. Paid marketing. Paid marketing, right. Even this initial post, right. You streaming as a lead magnet and convert listening to a buyer removing from streaming. Well, besides removing from streaming part that first half of that is basically what streaming platforms are trying to get you to do anyway. Hey, use us as a conduit to be discovered by new people and figure out how to make some money off of them. That's the most we could do. We're seeing the literal behavior of the streaming platforms move towards being paid marketing platform. Spotify is the biggest example of it. Spotify in the last two years alone has made massive changes to the back end of their platforms are all pointing to like, we want a little bit of that Facebook money. You know what I'm saying? We want a little bit of that paid advertising money. And in order for us to do that we have to make ourselves a discovery tool and be an asset to you in that. A lot of these moves, like he said, make sense for mid-sized to bigger artists because at those levels the discovery methods have already been figured out or they have enough of an audience that there's some organic discovery coming from word of mouth, you know what I'm saying? People sharing and doing things like that. So if you are not at the level of what that is happening for you, then yeah, this guy's completely right. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot. You are literally asking God one of your biggest chances to be heard and seen by new people. Now, you have other platforms that you figured out how to do that on? Okay, you got other platforms that you figured out how to do that on. Maybe your paid marketing is tight. You know what I'm saying? You're seeing some return. Yeah, like these are cool ideas to experiment with, but I really wish people would see that the same way we've seen it, bro. For the last two years, I have just viewed Spotify as a marketing platform. No different than my Facebook ad manager. No different than my Google ad manager. Only difference is you get paid a little bit of money back to market within it, you know what I'm saying?  We're not saying it's perfect. Like this person said it basically that summarize. Wancho Jack said in my head, now that I understand the music industry a bit more, that's what streaming platforms technically are. Yeah, you technically are already advertising yourself, right? Because he wants, this whole video is basically, hey, we'll just put a snippet or put your music out there for a short term and then bring people back to something. They are lead magnets. That's what you're doing on advertising. Once you get folks to tap into your links, tap into your profile, check out your music, right?  You're already doing some version of this, right? You can put out music and then have a secret project, right? A gated project. You already can do some version of this. So getting rid of the streaming platforms probably isn't the smartest move if you want a traditional career. Like you're trying to reach as many people as possible, you know, like make an impact and that way build value in your catalog in a traditional sense. If you just are looking to, you know, make some money, whatever that number is, I'm trying to hit six figures a year or something like that, you could probably figure that out and do that as well, all right? Probably can do that. Okay, everybody do that, no, all right? But can a fair amount of people do that consistently? It's possible. I'll say it's possible. But this, to me, this comes down to something we were talking about before the pot when it comes down to, I think you said it, you were like, I might as well not pay for it or something? Or... Oh, I said I'm not buying music unless it comes with something. At that point, I'm basically not even buying the music. You're buying the thing, right? And when you say comes with something you're talking about maybe it came with a physical vinyl that had a dope enough picture or came with some merch, yeah, I can say that, right? T-shirt, picture, something. And at that point, as a fan, this is fan mentality quarter, right? This isn't marketing advice, this is fan mentality. I'm not buying the music unless it comes with something else, all right, another cost. So I'm not really technically buying the music, I'm buying the thing. And then that's when I said, well, man, man, that's what will I am. And these other clips we've seen of people back in the day have talked about. Music has never been the thing that people have been buying. They've always been buying something else but music has been used to get people to buy something else. And now we're back to that loop. It's full circle. And I think it's a really hard thing to stomach. When I first heard it and thought about it, it was kind of mind blowing, it was weird, right? Cause we do loosely throw that out there. Yeah, we're buying music, we're purchasing it, but are we really? Now we can put a link in the description to that video talking about why people technically don't buy music and never have and why you need to figure out how to monetize beyond that. I think it's mind blowing for anybody who has not seen it. Because I haven't been able to find an argument to why that's not true.  For real, yeah. For real, yeah, cause now I'm looking at what other areas is technically true that's actually happening, right? Check that out in the description. Very, very valuable video. And other than that, this is yet another episode. No labels necessary. I'm Brandon Shaw. And I'm Cory. Yeah, peace.


The most important thing is religion becomes just purely a personal pursuit, never a national goal or a global goal.   As a Pakistani who's studying with Indians here in, you know, we live in harm... Outside that region, they do wonderfully well together. Of course, this is what my question is that we are divided by border, but we share a lot of things. We share poverty, we share hunger, any miseries you name and, you know, both sides of the countries are going through it.  How do you think this... the youth, because the majority of Indian population is youth and so is Pakistan? How can you think that we can come together and really alleviate the miseries and work together for a better future? Well, that's a dicey question. You must understand this.  Only when you identify or make a nation on a religious basis, you may believe so. Otherwise, we know we made it. We write a constitution, not a God-given document. We wrote it, subject to amendments, subject to changes, as it is required for the well-being of the people.  I wish someday we will get there, but you see, you're already break-sitting. See, what... what Europe has done in the last fifteen, twenty years is a truly phenomenal, fantastic achievement. After World War I, World War II, nobody ever thought the Germans and the French and the Italians and the English could come together. Nobody imagined. Could you have imagined this in 1945? I'm asking you. No, but you achieved this European Union. It's not a small thing. Don't think it's just an economic arrangement. It's a huge evolution in human consciousness. Yes or no? Yes. But now you're break-sitting. You can say whatever. People have voted for it. All right? People have chosen because for some economic reason or some other fear of immigration or whatever. All right? I'm not trying to blame anybody for that, but I'm saying, similarly, this India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, this whole region including Sri Lanka, Nepal, everything was like one nation. Though politically we were different nations, there were times when we were over two hundred different political entities, but still we were one nation in culture, in many different ways, in our transactions together. But whatever reason, there's no point doing historical post-modern and blame this person, that person, this situation, that situation. It's happened. Somebody drew lines without considering the geography of the land. Simply across rivers, across villages, across mountains, simply somebody drew lines, the kind of lines that you cannot defend, the kind of lines that needs constant engagement to keep it safe between the two nations. And above all, see one thing that we need to bring, if you, if young people, all of you and all of you, if you are interested in the future of this world, we've still not come to that place where people can just live out of their consciousness, living their religion, their heaven and stuff and all that. But we must do this much in your generation. The coming generation must do this much. Religion should be a personal pursuit for people. Those who wish to, they pursue personally their own stuff. But this ambitious way of approaching that, my religion should conquer the world, must go. This is one achievement you must do in the next twenty-five years, otherwise with the kind of technological advancements we have, we will have a massive disaster on this planet, isn't it? The days of the sword are over. The days of the sword are over. Now if we continue with the same attitude, we will have a supermassive disaster which will not benefit anybody for that matter, okay? Will not benefit the planet, will not benefit any creature on this planet, everybody will be hurt because of this. I'm saying one thing all of you are getting educated in premier institutions, one thing you must carry home wherever you go, whatever religious background you come from, make everybody understand your religion is your personal pursuit, do whatever you want, all right?  Don't tell me where to look. Yes? Don't tell me where to look. Don't force somebody else that this is the way or that is the way. If this one thing goes away, India-Pakistan will settle because culturally there's so much engagement, okay? I would say there was a South Asia conference in Dubai which I recently attended, but just at that time there was a terror attack in India and we had to insist that all Pakistanis drop out of the conference and it happened, unfortunately. I was looking forward to that engagement, but they had to drop out because this thing happened. What this is looking for is, we're all pushing for this, that South Asia region, which means India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, these... geographically one thing, we're looking at something like EU. Politically you can still be different, you can do whatever damn religion you want, but economically if we come together, we were the most prosperous part of the world at one time. That is because we operated as one at that time in many different ways, but today there is no way everybody is trapped in their own little boundaries. So this is one thing we should push for. If you want to push for this, the most important thing is religion becomes just purely a personal pursuit, never a national goal or a global goal. It is actually a global goal right now. It should just be personal pursuit, never a global goal. If you do this one thing, India, Pakistan, all these nations and many other nations coming together will become a reality. Thank you, Sadhguru, for the wisdom. We would now open up the questions for the floor and if anyone, you can raise your hands. I would request you to please guide us more on the issue of whole interpretation of religion as you said, that it has to be a personal matter. Religion as a concept as I, you've mentioned before, it was a new concept for India and it's surrounding places earlier, but people drew lines on those religious and social cultural aspects as well which eventually led to conflicts. So how do you see inner engineering, yoga as the way of resolving that conflicts and turning towards the inner self and breaking the barriers of religion?  Those who are incapable of making a plan and executing that plan always look forward to predictions. What prediction means is, you just hope it will happen. You are not willing to lend your life to make it happen. That's why I'm telling you, all of you young people should strive towards it.   What for? Simply because you ask questions for which they have no answers. I have never abused them. I have not abused their gods. I have not abused anything. I'm just asking questions. You went to heaven all right but without a body. So how are you going to eat food, good food and how are you going to do anything with these virgins? What are you going to do when I ask them? Why are they feeling so insulted? So this is one way for a long time, it's been like this for a couple of thousand years. One way to handle questions is kill the questioner. It's been an effective way till now, but no more. It's not going to work like that because today not just one person is going to ask questions, a billion people will ask questions. Yes? Once you raise a question, the whole world knows this is a question and everybody will ask the question. There was a time where only one person raised the question in a village or a town and you killed him and the question was over. Those days are over. So this is why you don't have to abuse anybody. But you must ask relevant questions, isn't it? Hello? Daring relevant questions, whatever matters in our lives, should we not ask questions at least even if you don't have answers? You don't have to abuse anybody, you don't have to deride anybody, but you must ask questions because if you ask three intelligent questions, ninety percent of the scriptures on the planet and all the three heavens will collapse right now. Last question. So I'm extremely impressed how you've said that religion shouldn't be a national goal. It should be something very personal and we should talk about the right thing. But as someone so many people look up to, don't you think you have a social responsibility to voice your concerns about some specific parties who are trying to spread religious extremism? Or because we can't please everyone, can we? So what are your thoughts on that?  But don't you think we should stand up against something which is wrong? I'm not against anything, that's what I want you to understand. I am for humanity. Human beings have come in variety of ways. It's okay with me because if all of them became like me, I wouldn't want to live in this world. They're all different. That's why at night look at them, how different they are, each one. That is why it is nice.  Just imagine in your home, if there's one more person just like you, could you live there? One is too much, isn't it? But they want a world full of their own kind. So I'm not against anybody. It's okay, everybody's saying what they're saying. As long as they don't get overly empowered, it's all right, they're expressing their opinions. Opinions are like catracks. The more you have them, the less you see. So I'm trying to bring clarity to them also. People say, Swadguru, you're seen with the celebrity, why did you sit with this person? You've seen with this politician, why did you sit with this person? I say, see, for the last 22 years I've been working in the prisons, both India and the United States. I'm constantly with murderers, rapists and all kinds of people. They're also okay with me because human beings do all these things. The question is only, will we as a generation create a situation where human beings can evolve into a higher possibility or do you want to shoot this one, hang that one, do that, do this, is this your solution?  Yes or no? Those who believed that they're bringing a solution forcefully, they did the worst things, isn't it so?   We don't want to make the same mistake. I want you to understand, those mistakes are no more affordable with modern weaponry and modern technology. Those mistakes are no more possible on this planet. If we commit the mistake of what the... I'm not supposed to mention these names, what Mussolini said, Alf Hitler's, Joseph Stalin's and whatever the religious nutcases have done, if we attempt the same thing in twenty-first century, we'll finish the whole humanity. We cannot afford that anymore. So the only way for all of us to progress is that whatever I think of you, you act... we accept you for who you are right now and see how we can all be on the same page at least on a few things. We all want health, we want all... all of us want to live joyfully, peacefully. At least on these things we are on the same page.  It's their choice. Let them do whatever. But the important thing is human needs, fundamental human needs are this. Once physical needs are taken care of, which fortunately for this generation like never before, though still there are complaints, there are segments of society unfortunately left out of that, still the largest number of human beings, their survival is better organized than ever before. Yes or no? It is so. Today if you have the money, you can go to the store and buy what you need for the next one year and not step out of your house and still manage. Believe me, if you were here hundred years ago or thousand years ago, if you want to start your day, you must take your bucket and walk a mile to River Thames to get your water.  Yes or no? So survival is better organized than ever before. Forever we've had problems of food, water, shelter, clothing. For the first time, all of you have five times more clothing than what your grandparents had. Yes or no? Huh? All of you have five times more clothing than what your grandparents had. You're also eating.  This is the first generation which has to be worried about how much to eat. Always every generation of people when they sat down for a meal, they stuffed as much as they could into themselves because there was so much physical activity to do. If you see the last generations of people, how they ate, when they sat down for a meal, they would sit like this.  If you don't eat like that, you'll run out of gas. Literally it's like gas, you know? Like filling the tank, you want to fill as much as you can.  So everything is better organized than ever before. Survival is better than ever before. This is the time to transform human consciousness. To transform or to raise human consciousness, we are doing various levels of activity. One, you know, you must sit through this in many different ways. Otherwise you won't understand why we are doing variety of things for this purpose because all these things have to be done. If you don't know all the pawns, there is no game. I want all of you to participate in whichever way you can to raise human consciousness either by yourself or seek our help. We are doing many things across the world. Please be a part of it. The important thing is all human beings, if their focus is towards their will-being and everybody's well-being irrespective of who they are, he's a... he's a bad neighbor for me. But I want him to be well. All right? This is important.  But I want you well. No. I'm not making a national commentary. Please do not understand whether he's from what... from Pakistan or from Kerala, it means the same thing. I'm saying, see, I don't have to say fantastic things about you. Yes, you're a bad neighbor, but I want you well because I know if you are well, you will be fine with me. When you're not well, you will try to infect me with the same thing. It's very important, everybody around you are well. If you want to be well, isn't it so? This is why I'm saying, be absolutely selfish. It is just that, why selfishness and greed also you're stingy, hmm? Why in that also you're stingy? At least in that you can be generous, you can't give away things, all right? At least be absolutely selfish, no? What I want for myself, I want for everybody, hmm? Let's create an absolutely selfish world.  Let's make it happen. Thank you.


époque 😥 we spent majority of support and said to we should take the responsibility from our govt. button instantly in parliament. We decided to give the final public comment in public. The people of the parliament declined and we had no choice because of the elections. जादी आपनों को आमा भीट्रेटी बहल गिला, ते बे आमा चानल को लाएक, शेर, और सबस्क्रेप करीप को जमा भी बुलों तो रहीं.


Welcome to Manchester for race of two of the Monster Energy FIM Speedway of Nations. Well as you know we've already got Sweden, Poland and Germany through, but the next seven nations are here to battle it out in Manchester. Now Team GB of course are the host nation and that's why we're here in Bellevue. Now we're on the track at the moment, practice is about to start. We're probably about three minutes away from practice, so we probably do need to get off the track. I'm just sort of wandering this way because I just wanted to show you the Craig Cook and Robert Lambert behind me. They're just doing their track walk, just assessing the track.  If you don't see Ty there of course, Ty their leader, but Ty is in Poland traveling back. He didn't actually race last night in the end. I think the meeting was cancelled, but he is in Poland and will be back and will be ready to race a little bit later on. Now we're just going through the gates into a very noisy pit because as we said, they are getting ready to practice. Now this is what's all behind the scenes. These are the pit bays. Okay, well Jason Doyle, if you've seen across social media, is not joining Australia. Chris Holder will be replacing him and also Finland have replaced their number one rider as well. So we'll head down here through all of the crowds. France and Finland, of course. T-Boss 3 are exactly who we were talking about. Just have a look over here, actually. We'll step away a little bit. We'll walk back up here because as much as we're used to the noise, that is very, very loud down in that pit bay. Okay, well Alan Roster, as you well know, is our team GB manager. He'll just be talking to the boys as well. They'll be looking to get themselves on the podium again in Russia. Russia's 20th and 21st of July. They're the host nation Russia because they won last year. And as I mentioned, Sweden, Poland and Germany are already through for Australia, Denmark and Team GB are the favorites. But one of those three is going to have to join the race off. So it will be down to the wire as always. Now it's going to be a packed crowd. Some tickets are still available. So if you want to get yourself online, then have a look at those and keep up to date across all of the social media. Well, I'm just lurking around here because I was hoping we might be able to grab a quick word with Alan. Philip Morris just walking behind. He's our race director as well. He'll be sort of sending out all of the information to the riders. I think we'll get out of the way because practice is just about to begin. Our first set going out. Now Australia are actually going out first. And so we'll see team captain Chris Holder, Max Frick as well, all out onto the track. So we'll just keep an eye. We'll just watch that at the moment. You can just see them getting ready to go out for practice. Remember, keep up to date with everything that's happening here on the Speedway of Nations on all of our social media. We'll be live on TV from around about seven o'clock local time. It's the man I've been waiting for. Alan, you are avoiding us for a second. How are you doing? Yeah, very well. Thank you. How's the track looking? I just saw you out with the boys. Obviously we had a lot of rain over the last few days. So it's quite heavy in places at the moment. So it'll be interesting to watch how practice goes. Okay, well, Ty not here yet, but how are Craig and Robert feeling? Yeah, they're all very relaxed. Even myself, I'm quite relaxed. I must be getting old. Well, the sun's shining in Manchester. There's a first for everything. There is. We don't normally see this. It's an alien in the sky. Thanks, Alan. We'll see you a bit later on. Thank you very much. Okay, well, as we mentioned, Australia heading out there. So we'll just turn our eyes just to the Australian team because they are going out for practice. As we mentioned, Chris Holder, Max Frick, Chris Holder now the captain just heading out onto the track. We'll just walk you up here and we'll just leave you with Australia going out onto the track. Make sure you keep up to date with everything across our social media and we'll see you in a bit.


You want to start trouble come any closer. Hey mysterious leave this place Fine keep it up. If you want trouble get away. You don't want to be here today sells or


All right, so oh wait the slide okay the slides are showing now okay so yeah I'm Carl Xander you can find me still I'm still on Twitter so you can find me on twigpress or at carlexander.ca if you've ever seen a talk by me I always have this slide because I love talking about advanced programming or anything topic and I like to help you understand those topics but I always have a bit of material and things for you to help you walk you through this but also I want to make it really open to all of you if you have any questions at any time feel free to stop me and ask questions it's better to ask me now than like keep it till the end and then you're lost for the the entire rest of the talk because this slide is really important today I think I'm gonna lose a lot of people so we're gonna go I love this saying servers we can't live without them we can't live with them and we can't live without them whenever your server blows up you're like oh my god like why am I managing this stuff why am I dealing with this how can I make this less painful for me to handle and there's a few solutions here so who here uses a server management system so spin up run cloud server pilot okay there's a couple of you so the thing with those server management tools is that you're still responsible so I've been a system in since I'm 14 it was my first summer summer job I was doing Windows NT servers I had a pager no I do not want to have a pager anymore I'm nothing is more stressful than being on pager duty so even with these server management tools if something happens with the server I mean I use spin up there's still sometimes where the server something happens with server spin-up sends an alert you're still the one responsible for dealing with that and that's still stressful and that's usually when you get into WordPress hosting so I assume everybody else here is gonna raise their hand when I say do you use WordPress hosting right okay okay so that's what you pay WordPress hosting for right you that you're like I don't want to know anything about servers I I trust you especially if you use the good ones then they usually stay up the less you know known web hosting companies is a bit more rock and roll but you still there's still a problem with WordPress hosting so who here has had an issue with a site where everything's good and then oh they write you know a viral article or something like that and then the whole thing blows up or like e-commerce e-commerce also is a really good example especially so in those scenarios like you have to usually buy a hosting plan to deal with that worst-case scenario you have to like and then you're stuck paying for that over provisioned server or you're stuck managing up upscaling and downscaling so I deal with some customers where they do it all themselves and that's stressful too because if you forget it's your money basically that you're spending forgetting to like upscale downstate so the goal of serverless is to address these problems so the first question you're probably wondering is what is serverless and a second question that you're gonna ask me is are there really no servers with serverless literally everyone asked me that and the answer is that no there's still servers with serverless they're still there I I'm not a big fan of the term it's a marketing term somebody in the marketing department decided like oh serverless sounds cool we're gonna use this term and so everybody started using it and all the engineers are like this makes no sense and they're like it's too late it's out there in the wild we can't do anything about it this is the term we have it's serverless we're keeping it but what is serverless for serverless is basically what they call functions as a service so with it's like Google Cloud functions AWS lambda I think Azure functions but what it is is conceptually it's on the band computing so what you do is you upload code the code gets executed when in responsive event so something happens a page view something triggered in somewhere else in AWS and the code gets it the code gets executed runs return something and then shuts down you'll notice we don't mention servers and what that that's because server well okay I'm at the right slide okay servers are basically outside of your sphere of concern so really what serverless means and that's where the confusion comes from is that it's not that there's no more servers is that they're really not they're really outside your sphere of concern and one thing I'll mention a bit later is a bit I'm a bit like the person in the early 2000s that's like have you heard for the cloud and they're like no like you run your own data centers obviously but the whole point of the cloud is to not have to think about data centers and the whole point of serverless is to not even have to think about the server itself so it's not even a question of oh I don't have to think about like data centers I don't even have to think about the Linux box itself so how does this work the best way I found to explain that is to start with talking about how WordPress works today on a server so I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with how WordPress works on a server this is basically how WordPress works on a server for almost every hosting provider I always joke that they're just all selling vanilla and it's just different there's been flavors of vanilla so one person's French vanilla and somebody else another flavor of vanilla so you always have an HTTP cache so either you're using cloud flair or you're using WP rocket or something like that to like do the page caching if that page is on cache it hits the server slash WordPress and then WordPress does either SQL queries directly to the database or if you're using object caching it will do object cache requests and check if it has that and send it back and then just that gets sent back to your browser that's like essentially like almost out every host every WordPress site system whatever is really hosted at this point this came from like this slide comes from like a talk I gave in 2016 I think it was called like the modern WordPress server stack and basically at this point everybody uses more or less the same thing so that's what it looks like now with serverless WordPress we have to go a bit further back because what serverless WordPress is is really serverless PHP so how does PHP work in switch okay how did PHP work on how does it work on a web server so we're gonna zoom it a bit further in so when you're on the web server so everybody here's knows Apache and Gen X we're good okay cool so normally you make your browser makes a request it hits Apache or engine X Apache or engine X decides okay what are you asking me for me right now are you asking me for a file you're asking me for PHP if it determines that it's asking for PHP it makes a call it to the PHP interpreter so if you're with PHP with Apache it used to be just PHP itself with you if you're with engine X which most people are now it's PHP FPM that you call but the idea is the same you basically the web server gets the request realizes that it's for PHP sends it to PHP PHP does its magic you know runs WordPress the WordPress script returns some HTML sends it back to the web server and the web server is like okay here's the status code everything let me send that back to the browser so that's how PHP works so how does serverless PHP compare to all of this so far so both of them will run code so like I said before when I explained what serverless is I mentioned in response to an event so in both cases your serverless code and your regular how PHP works right now they both run your PHP code in response to the event one is something calls AWS Lambda and decides okay we need to run this PHP code with a traditional server you basically have your engine X that determines okay this is PHP code let's call PHP FPM and have it run it so what's different then well it's not just PHP now that runs without a server it's everything so when you're starting to think about serverless WordPress and serverless PHP you're thinking about a service-based architecture so now all the blocks that we were talking about earlier when we looked at it get replaced by services I'm using a I'm with AWS so I'm more familiar with that but there we'll talk more about that in a second but it it starts looking something like this so you have your browser making a request to some something called an API gateway which acts a bit like your engine X so it receives the HTTP request it's like okay what's going on right now it determines oh we want to make a request to Lambda and sends it to Lambda then inside the Lambda there's the PHP runtime and your PHP code so your WordPress code would be here and then there's a PHP runtime which I'll explain in a second PHP runtime so what is the PHP runtime so the PHP runtime is really kind of the secret not secret sauce but it's the unique element that makes PHP serverless PHP work so the best analogy that I have for it is like imagine you have your engine X directives that you have like so when you configure engine X you have a bunch of rules those are the rules that determine what am I trying to do with this web request am I asking for a PHP file am I asking for a regular file basically the runtime acts as this layer this the configuration the host configuration or the server configuration inside your engine X or patchy I'm gonna go but so once it does that it does a couple of things so it processes the Lambda event so it receives an event from the AWS architecture it basically decides okay what am I trying to do here am I requesting a PHP file am I requesting a CSS file am I requesting something that should be a 404 what am I trying to do so it figures what the event wants and then it sends the result back so it's gonna be an HTTP response but a goal here is to mimic parts of the web server so if you request a file you return a file if you want PHP it creates a fast CGI request and sends it to PHP FPM and once PHP FPM determines what the once PHP FPM runs has a response sends that back but it also manages the PHP FPM process so each Lambda only has one PHP worker that's because Lambda can only handle one event at a time and the the idea with that is that the whole thing is self-contained inside this one Lambda that acts and I'm gonna get back to that because that's the really key point is that this entire thing mimics basically one PHP worker so if you if you're familiar with PHP FPM you can configure it to have like a pool of workers that it can scale and down scale and demand but each Lambda is essentially a PHP worker now if we start zooming out again and this is where it might lose a bit of people but right now I've shown you what it looks like just for PHP but what happens if we like zoom out and we look at what our modern WordPress architecture looks if we move it to all services looks something like this so now you're dealing with you still have your caching you still have your your htcache but now you have your file so who here uses something like offload s3 or something like that so so you have to we're gonna talk about that in the drawbacks but you all your media assets are in s3 so you have to determine whether you're requesting for a media asset and then if you're not it goes through the API gateway which is our web server the Lambda which is our PHP worker then we still have our caching object caching and our database so that's what it kind of looks like at a high level here so the essential part here to understand is that it's very it's all around very similar it's really we like swapped different parts of like the the previous like if you imagine like the the previous picture that I show which is the modern WordPress architecture we just started swapping a couple of parts with services and that's essentially what what the architecture looks like at a high level so any questions so far we're gonna ask that again so but if you have any questions please don't hesitate it's better to ask now than wait till the end so here I want to talk about the advantages so you might be wondering at this point like why like why you talk me about this like this looks really complicated you lost me already why are we talking about this no servers to manage what I've been like I said I started being assisted me at 14 I don't want to manage servers anymore I don't want to be on a page on the pager duty or whatever it's it's a lot to manage servers it's it's tiring and it's not our area of expertise you know I don't know servers as well as somebody at GoDaddy or new folder especially those ones that manage their own data centers but even somebody at WP engine but they don't even know it as well as the people as AWS because the scale is completely different and not everybody's comfortable with servers like who here's comfortable with servers one two three maybe so three and a half four so you know we have almost a full we have a half full room and I had four hands up so there's not there's a problem with that we we're not most of us aren't we're developers we're not sysadmin we didn't start our career being sysadmin and that's stressful and it's stressful to be responsible for all of that even even when you're with WordPress hosting and something goes wrong it's stressful and WordPress hosting tries to solve this issue but the new problem that we're seeing at least that I'm seeing a lot is scaling now because WordPress is changing WordPress used to be just content sites and now it's becoming more applications you who here manages WooCommerce sites yeah a lot of you who here manages LMS's site like Lyft or LMS learn-dash exactly more and more people those aren't content sites they're applications and scaling is an issue like if you're hosting a webinar and a thousand people show up you're and you're like on a $50 a month server it's gonna blow up and then they're gone and then either you upscaled it ahead of time and then it's your responsibility to downscale it or you just pay for that maximum scaling all the time and that's also a problem for a lot of WordPress hosting because most WordPress hosting is single server so I know that I'm not the only one working on this but we're a couple of people trying to work on scaling WordPress elastically like horizontally and but for most of us that buy if you buy on WP engine you're buying a single server you're not buying anything elastic that can scale on demand at that I at that quickly you know when you're sending a sale email with WooCommerce or your people are coming in with your webinar that scaling doesn't happen fast enough that's called like the tundering herb problems so with this like I said now each lambda function is a PHP worker so essentially you can have thousands of them and you can scale it in seconds and not minutes because that's what I tried to do like this was like I actually did even something crazier racially but this was like two years ago and basically I sent 1500 users to to to check out on WooCommerce and we basically got to 800 concurrent so that means it was 1800 PHP workers running to give you an idea usually if you buy who here has a 96 core server that they pay for okay well I have a cuss I have a customer with that they're $3,000 a month you would need about five of those to to run this the test I tested recently that cost $10 so that kind of scaling is really hard to do even with servers Kubernetes is fast but it's not that fast and you end up with these kind of situation that's what happens with the tundering herb like the first server comes online it's already broken because yet like the demand's already too high and then it's scaling and scaling and especially for these scenarios you're losing a lot of money while that's happening so what do people do when I do consulting is they need to plan for the worst so yeah they're gonna buy those five $3,000 a month servers because otherwise they're losing $10,000 a minute in sales so yeah obviously they're gonna make sure that they have that but like I said that like how much does that cost you just to keep that running or you got to just do it yourself or talk with them but even then like like I said nobody's really solved the multi-server thing right so I'm talking about five servers but actually nobody's really done that yet at any sort of like really scale so while I can give you a theoretical number of how much that would cost nobody can do that yet and the cool thing is you don't have any of that with with serverless all that you have is that you pay for what you use so you pay when your worker runs and you're charged by the millisecond so if especially for these LMS sites it's kind of cool because oh you get that webinar and then after that it's people are gone and then you don't have to do anything you're not paying for anything there's no traffic to the site you're not you're not doing anything so you don't get paid for it the only thing that you're paying for is your database because you can't just shut down your database and turn it on when you want so maybe one day we'll get to that but we're not there yet for that one so those are kind of the advantages the real big advantages with serverless now what are the drawbacks you know maybe you're thinking like Carl like this sounds too good like I don't trust you like what the hell one of the scary this part is even if I tell you cost less usage based pricing is scary you know it's there's one thing with paying paying for a server it feels safe you know you pay X per month you know that each month you're paying $49 if you need more performance you pay more simple predicting serverless costs okay how many requests they get what's the average duration like what services got hit like it depends on your usage pattern like what application you're running and things like that even if it costs you less like even if you would I like serverless is already competitive pretty much at the $49 a month plan but it's still stressful and harder to budget for it so even if I tell you cost less there's something safe about knowing that you're paying a fixed amount for that even each time so it's cost less and then the other one that another thing that people don't always like is AWS who here uses AWS oh wow actually genuinely surprised there's a lot of you because I'm used to like when I'm totally like AWS like I have like I mean who here is was ever a Windows system in okay yeah who gets a PTSD from like the AWS consoles from yeah yeah exactly you get it like you it's it's scary and you know when you when you tell somebody or I tell somebody like oh you're gonna need to like use AWS or like oh my god it's so big like there's so many things there's so many servers services and I don't know what they mean so that's like a scary part and you might be wondering why not Azure or GCP and the reason for that is unfortunately it's not interchangeable like conceptually there's the same but as we saw earlier we're not just using Lambda we need the other services as well for for those things so they're equivalent well then switch okay they're equivalent but they're not the same so they don't have the same limitations they don't behave the same way so that's kind of like the why multi cloud is kind of a pipe dream like nobody really everybody chooses one cloud and stays with it and the reality is that there's so much energy in the PHP community in all the other programming communities around AWS that it just that's where the energy is and that's why it's mostly only on AWS that you'll find there's some people working a bit on the other services but most of the energy if you look online like the serverless PHP is called a breath so breath it's only on AWS as well so that's one of the drawbacks as well and then the last drawback is repress assumes you're on the server so there's a few issues with that when you know like you can trick it but there's still a few things that people are might not be like comfortable with because of that one you can't install teams and plugins directly why because it's read only you have to deploy the way that AWS makes this so scalable is that you package the application and then it can like boom create like 16,000 copies of it 1600 sorry but I could also do 16,000 but like it could do like thousands of copies of it but for that to happen it needs to be packaged you can't be modifying the files or whatnot so usually the way it works if who here works it does enterprise yeah so who here lets their enterprise users install plugins and teams exactly nobody does so if you come for an enterprise background it makes a lot of sense but if you're not then it can be a bit of a sore point and depends on your what your customer or client expects as well maybe they expect to be able to make modifications and things like that the other part to is the media library I had to actually do a lot of R&D to get the meetings because obviously when you upload a file you're uploading it to a server so what happens instead when you're uploading a file now well you actually have to upload it directly to S3 so none of the S3 plugins do this like you actually have to like send it directly because the thing is you might send the file to one one lambda and then you talk to another one like you can't be sure that the file that you uploaded is there so you have to basically send everything as three but that kind of like messes around like if you use a lot of media library plugins or media manipulation plugins those don't work very well you're better off using a CDN like photon note is it photon tacky on tacky photon yeah photon like something like photon I have I built something like photon to where I'll talk in a second about EMEAR but but that's the idea you use you use a CDN to do the manipulation and instead don't rely on WordPress to do it which is where it's trending largely but still that's still a drawback that you should be aware of and then sometimes plugins assume that your own server too you know I most of the time that really the popular plugins that follow coding standards and PHP coding standards of WordPress coding standards don't have any problems with this like I work with Beaver Builder Elementor and all the page builders you think like this would like explode for them and then it's like works flawlessly it's usually plugins that don't follow conventions or things like that or do things that are kind of greedy server greedy that will kind of cause issues but you have to be aware that there's potential compatibility issues so it's not perfect yet but it's getting better every time alright we're almost done here no questions oh yeah do we do a microphone we'd like to ask how you manage PHP sessions in this well depends the PHP sessions can be managed different ways because you have in general with WordPress they're cookie based sessions but obviously you can't have them on you can't do the sessions that are files right but there you can do sessions that are SQL you can do sessions that are read us or you can do the cookie sessions they work fine but by default WordPress just does cookie sessions so that's like tends to be the standard even in with Laravel it's cookie sessions like it's almost never like stored directly on the server because like this isn't common again because we're so WordPress has always been single server we do things that like that other PHP projects don't do and file sessions on the server does not work the minute you do any sort of like horizontal scaling with like two servers right if you had two servers it wouldn't work it doesn't it wouldn't work either way if you had like file sessions on the server as well yeah yeah you could do a memcache but I only I only have read us with this but yes you could do memcache so but you could also do read this for the sessions and that will work fine it's really the the ones if you use files to do the session storage that it won't work everything else every other method is is not server dependent to do it like whether it's cookies or read this memcache or SQL to store the sessions one more question yeah what exactly you do to keep the lambda functions warm because after a few minutes there is no request to the lambda function that will be in the oh I see somebody knows this stuff okay so I'm gonna nerd out a bit so with lambda so what he's asking is basically normally the way it works with lambda is like they leave the the function running for about five to ten minutes and then it shuts down so if you don't get any any requesting that time like you will go back to zero and then the ramp up the scaling can cause some issues so the way that you're there's two ways you can solve that one there's you can pre provision functions if you want to keep them always running but the other way is there's you can ping them so you can play basically I'm just like I'm this probably above everybody a lot of people but in cloud watch you can basically set an event every five minutes I ping let's say you want to keep 500 them running I ping 500 and then it'll just keep them warm basically so there's a small cost to that but it's like what two milliseconds every five minutes so it's very easy to do a cost about a cost analysis on that as well because you'll know how much it costs and how long it runs and it's just a ping it's not it's not even running WordPress so it's running it's just really pinging the lambda function to make sure that there's enough of them running does that answer your question okay awesome any other questions okay so I just wanted to so we've talked about advantages and disadvantages and one thing that I want to close on that section is just when you're evaluating whether you want to use serverless and not I've talked a lot about cost and it's really tempting to just compare costs you know serverless is expensive I can just buy a five dollar a month droplet from Digital Ocean or Vulture and that'll be fine but that's usually somebody that's comfortable with servers somebody like me will be like oh this is fine like I can like run this on this five dollar a month droplet but it's kind of a false equivalence so you're kind of being dishonest when you just compare the costs like that because there's a lot of intangible costs to managing servers you know like evenings ruined you know no it's true like I had a server blow up on New Year's Eve this year like it it's not fun like I still manage sure even if I'm promoting serverless I'm still managing servers for people so I still have ones blow up on New Year's Eve so it's not fun there's intangible costs and it's there's mental health costs like it's like stressful it's just it's it's not something that you want to do I like who here is on pay has ever been on pager duty yeah there's a couple of them I hope many of you enjoy being on pager duty yeah there's no hands raising there's there's nothing pleasant about being on pager duty there's nothing pleasant about managing servers when it's not your area of expertise or something that you're comfortable with and even when you're comfortable with it like me I'm still looking I'm I should be the last person here talking about serverless because I know servers so well yet I'm the one talking about it because I don't like it either it affects my mental health affects my life I and I don't want it I don't want it anymore and then the last one I think is really important is we really discount our time here like we're like oh I'll go fix this like you know you know how much you charge your clients right you you know how much you're worth so you're like oh let me just go fix this and I like two hours later you're still trying to fix it and you're like oh I could have you know and then you can't charge your client because it's like you're it's your responsibility so it's just there your time is valuable so don't discount it like it's it's it's a part of the cost of of managers server you know it might cost $5 a month on digital ocean but if it takes you like 10 hours to set it up I mean those 10 hours are still worth something so don't don't discount it alright so we're gonna talk tools and projects and I'm the only one that does serverless per press so I mean I'm I've been I we're I was talking about this before the talk started I've been organizing work camps for a while and I always feel really awkward when somebody does a talk and they're the only one that does something for that specific talk and here I am doing exactly that so I'm serverless PHP has a lot of tools and options available to them I'm the only I was basically at Laracon in 2019 I saw Taylor Otwell come out with Laravel vapor and I was like this is so cool I want we're pressed to have this and I just like started building it and it's open source so if you go to the emir app account on github you'll find everything that you need to run the you'll find the runtime you'll you'll find the runtime and the WordPress plugin that I used to make WordPress work on AWS Lambda but I still need to kind of fund myself because I do some consulting but it I should be working on this full-time so that's why Sanjay introduced me like I work on emir emir is basically the equivalent of of Laravel vapor so I'm gonna I have to like speed it up a bit but it's the equivalent of Laravel vapor so I just managed the AWS infrastructure so it's not about like the serverless part like you could use my parts and just put everything up together yourself if you want but for somebody that's stressed and you know oh my god I don't know anything about AWS well that's kind of what that product solves and also I have github sponsor if you want to help me but I'm sure that over time there's gonna be more and more people that it's gonna there's a serverless framework so if somebody wants to try to get this to work with serverless framework or help me get it to work with serverless framework I would love that but for now it's just me and that's kind of what's happening so I'm gonna close it out while talking about the future of hosting if you had to start a hosting company today would you buy a server no no of course not yeah you get one in the cloud right like you know like there's a reason you there's a reason I joke that I'm the guy in the early 2000 talking about like have you heard about the cloud and they're like no of course not you build your own data centers you manage them it's like no that's like you don't want to have to do that like if you don't like managing server you're gonna like it even less having to go into the rack to reset it like I had to do that like I had to drive to the office to reset a server in a rack it's not fun you obviously you get one in the cloud and serverless kind of next evolution of this step because not only do you want to not care about like the actual physical server but really like who here likes doing like server updates who likes having to raise this head but you know who likes knowing that after four years their Ubuntu LTS is is done and then they have to migrate like everything to a new machine you know it's just like no like serverless like who here is uses next Vercel or Netlify okay there's not I actually expected considering like how much more JS there is in WordPress now I thought there'd be more people but whenever I talk with people from the JS space they get it like right away they're like I just deployed a Vercel and then I don't have to think about like how much memory how many PHP workers it just scales like it does what it needs to do I deploy and I forget it and that's like what serverless is about it's about deploying and and just having it scale and behave and just the code runs it does its thing and the cool thing with that is that it levels the playing field so who here has ever heard of FATM analytics so FATM analytics is like my favorite example of like the power of serverless there are two people and one developer and they built a Larival app that does like privacy focused analytics and they require they deal with billions of requests a minute and they're one person they're one developer and it's all possible about because of serverless because they just deploy and the whole thing scales and they can just they can do it like they can two people can take on Google analytics with this tech it's awesome like that gets me so excited I love it and there's a lot of you here that build products so I'm like what I find it's exciting about working on this tech is like what cool stuff you could build like one my favorite examples is like what if gravity forms took on like type form like what if they just hosted their forms and just like took on type form but like rethinking of rethinking how what kind of products what times of things that you can do with WordPress when you don't have to worry about scaling especially since we're moving to more and more WordPress applications gets me really really excited and that's it I don't think we have a lot of time for questions but I don't know if there any there's do we have time for one okay that's an annoying one I'm sorry so thanks first of all but I have one question regarding DDoS attacks so yeah DDoS attacks can be held back by on a DNS level but when they come through yeah every request and if you find a very load bearing request on the PHP level will count rack up money well okay so for that there's a couple so if we go back I mean I'm not gonna it's too hard to go back to the slide with a clicker but when you have cloud front sitting in front you can attach the web like email does that you can attach the web application firewall and then put a rate limit on it and you're kind of okay but you're gonna hit unless they're really trying to but cache bust the cloud front because of how the architectures like structured it kind of mitigates some of the DDoS attacks but I'm again I'm like involved in all the serverless PHP like groups so like I took a lot of the lessons do you you I think you raise your hand for fat amount of links right yeah so you saw when they got like DDoS right so I was like with Jack and like in their slack and like there's a lot of like the things that he figured out that are just already implemented in emir that you can just turn on yeah from the right up and just from talking with him as well but usually just putting a rate limit at the is probably the cheapest and easiest option for that but obviously if you're getting like if a competitor decides to really attack you then it's like you saw what he did right like he paid for like the expert the expert service but those are always a potential issue but DDoS I mean who here has had their server shut down by one of their hosts because they got like some sort of like attack or like yeah like that happens all the time like they were gonna do it to you like it's cause it's gonna cause problems but the cost thing is still valid but I think if you put some alerts and things like that like we can talk about it but like there are ways and I'm making more and more ways to make stat like as safe as possible but one thing I do different from vapor is that you don't get the unlimited scaling by default so it's gonna cap your your lambda functions and you're not gonna end up with you know three thousand of them running for like hours so that's that's something that I did by default so I'm gonna I'm gonna have to stop here because I'm already five minutes over but you can find me here also twig press Carl Alexander and the blog the emir blog has a lot of articles so if you want to a lot of the things that I talked here has very detailed articles on the emir blog that you can read because I like writing like 4,000 word articles so basically you can find like on the architecture on the runtime all that you can find like you all the write-ups on that and thank you very much