So, hello everybody. I'm Mehdi Doghi, Debian contributor. I'm here to speak about Saibyan, which is a distro for industrial R&D needs and engineers. Another way to put it is distro for scientific computing. So, we are mainly interested at the HPC clusters and the workstations for scientific engineers. And another simple way to look at it is just Debian derivative. So, why we did Debian derivative, what it's meant for, what we did integrate it, et cetera. So, a bit of history. So, I work for EDF, which is Electricity de France. So, you can see here France. And since 2003, we are using an internal distro based on Debian for our needs. And we just thought that it should be useful to the community to publish it publicly and try to gather a wider community around this project and contribute on the same basis. So, in my presentation, I will briefly introduce our business context, why we use it for and what do we deploy using Saibyan. So, our scientific needs, IT needs, and what we did in Saibyan and how, basically. So, just one little slide about EDF for those who don't know the company. It's a large electricity producer and seller. It's a world nuclear energy leader, leader in the world and European hydro power leader. We are not only implemented in France, but all over the world. So, we do also business in Asia and the United States. It has a big annual revenue, but it's more impressive in numbers, but we are organizing small teams. Another way to look at it is like many small business units with their own budget, resources, etc. So, we don't have, sadly for Debian, we don't have that budget for Saibyan. We have a large R&D division which does a lot of work on all things related to energy and how to implement that, how to make it more, I mean, safer and cheaper. And you have a nice webpage if you're interested in more, to have more details about the company, I put the link. So, our scientific computing needs. So, at EDF, we have the R&D which works on the modeling staff, on the conception, on the renewable energies and electrical networks. All that is necessary to produce electricity in a safer and cheaper way and make it controllable by the engineering to make it efficient. One of the things that Saibyan is used for at EDF is for the power management. We have computing chains which make simulations to make us able to reduce downtime of nuclear power plants during the maintenance. And we also have all the simulations of the renewable energies but it's less computing intensive. We are also trying to plan for the conception and prediction weeks in advance because if you have a big delta between the two, you're losing much more money and it's not good for the business. So, we are trying to make that predictable and adjust either way to reduce the delta. So, more concretely, we do some modeling. So, we try to approximate reality with models and then we use those models to implement scientific codes to simulate what could happen in a system. And then try to visualize the results on the hardware with some big GPUs because you have many big simulations to visualize. It takes a lot of RAM, etc. So, you need the IT that comes with it. It's necessary for that. So, what are our typical IT user needs? They use workstations, laptops. So, for modeling, visualizing, for developing codes and accessing all the IT infrastructures, we have the high performance clusters deployed internally which contain thousands of nodes, of compute nodes, and we have some small computing chains which are used for small simulations which doesn't necessarily need a big HPC cluster. So, all those are using Saiban. All those are using the same packages, the same kernel. And we have a single solution to deploy all those environments. It's Saiban. So, Saiban is heavily based on Debian. We actually don't fork the kernel. It's Debian's kernel. We don't recompile the kernel modules. We don't fork Debian. We take Debian, Debian stable, actually, or old stable, and we add on top of that some customizations to make it suitable for our IT needs. To make it, for example, connected to the LDAP server, to make it with the printers, to be able to deploy it on the HPC clusters with the newer drivers because it's much more interesting to run new hardware for the computing because it consumes less energy. So, you have to follow the technology somehow and we do that with the same environment which is Saiban. So, we have on one side our users and some applications that do some computation regularly. Like, for example, for predicting the consumption and production, there is some codes running at different times of the day which tries to make that, makes the numbers. On the other side, we have the IT infrastructure deployed. So, a few servers, few workstations, and a few clusters. To give you a rough idea, we have, I think, like 1,500 workstations and something like 4,000 compute nodes deployed using Debian and in production. So, why did we choose Debian? We are firmly attached to Debian. I wouldn't have worked on Saiban if it wasn't based on Debian. So, we use one OS with the same stack on all the environments which gives us a full binary compatibility between all the environments.  They don't have to port it or test it otherwise because they are guaranteed to have binary compatibility and have the same software stack. So, that's interesting for us. We don't want to have separate environments and separate and different OSes between the clusters, for example. The RISC cycle, we have one major version every two or three years, which is OK for our IT planning. Debian has just the largest scientific offering, largest package repository with a lot of scientific software. So, it's very convenient for us because when you need something, you have 80% chance of finding it in the archive. So far, there is only Ubuntu which matches this criteria, but basically by taking what Debian did. One interesting question could be why Debian instead of Ubuntu, which has some security, not security ports, not only security ports, but also contractual support, which might be interesting for industrial users. So, in Debian, all what you find in main is maintained with the same criteria, with the same QA, with the same expectations, and with the same workflow. While it's different in Ubuntu, Ubuntu focuses its main on some core components which they maintain, and then the community takes care of the rest of the packages. So, it makes somehow some second class packages, and we don't find this solution suitable for us, so we picked and stayed on Debian. Debian is also designed for customization. The installer is very modular. It's easy to get your stuff done in the installer simply. At least for my experience, simpler than in Kickstarter, for example, if you want to adapt it to your needs. You also have easy ways and many documentation to make your deployments and configuration easy. The community is also quite open. How do you see it? It's a fully benevolent, driven project, so whenever you need something to get done in Debian, you can just contribute it. It's really a dual-currency, so if you are interested in something, and you have the resources and the skills to do it, it's very easy to get it integrated in Debian. That's very convenient for us, because whenever we stabilize some packages or development, we can make sure to integrate it and have it also available to the community and have the community contribute to its maintenance. We share the load with all the actors. It's easy to integrate new applications, because packaging helpers are really cool these days. It used to be complicated and it's easier and easier with time. When you look at Debian rules today, it's very simple. You only need a few lines to make your package work, and it's not the case for other distributions. You have also abundant documentation, which gets it very easy to start doing some stuff and contribute. All those are very reasons to use Debian and stay on Debian. You might ask me why did you choose to make a derivative? Why not just using Debian proper? We used to have a six-year support on each Debian release, stable release or old stable release. Debian catched up a bit with Debian LTS, so we are able to do five or six-year support now, but it was not the case before. By doing it internally, we have the choice to make it longer. For example, for our IT needs, we still support Debian squeeze. In the total, we will support it for eight years, because there are some business applications that are still needed. We cannot port the servers to newer versions of Debian, so we still maintain the support. We have also our own security team inside Debian. It's not a big team, but enough for our needs. So it has two advantages. You might make different choices than Debian. For example, if Debian didn't qualify some vulnerability as critical, but at the same time, it's important for us, we can fix it internally. We don't have to force Debian to update stable for that. On the other side, if you are proactive and wanted to fix a security bug that is also important for Debian, we can contribute it. We actually contribute to the LTS effort, so it's one way also to give back to the community. Another big reason is because in the scientific context, when you buy hardware, you want to get most of it. You want to take advantage of all the performance that the hardware is capable of doing. So you have to deploy the new drivers with all the new versions, and it's not very easy in Debian to make that happen for stable releases whenever the versions come out. So it's mainly used for InfiniBand, Omnipath, Nvidia and some other kernel drivers and Intel micro architectures. That's basically it, so the hardware part of the infrastructure and some storage stuff. But at least we have that possibility. It's flexible enough to be able to integrate anything in the repositories. So it's not always easy also. Like I said, we still support Screes because some business applications were not ported to newer versions of Saebian. It's also because there were some libs removed in Debian. So we keep them around to make the applications still run because they are critical. And we have more time to... Yeah, there is LibTau, if I recall correctly. Tau, T-A-O, which got removed from Weezy, if I recall correctly. And so the question was, can you give some example of some removed library? And the most recent one that I recall is LibTau. It's a crappy thing. You don't want to use it. But yeah, we have some business applications that use it. And the scientific software is not known for using all new kind of technologies. And we have the choice to agree to new major versions of some software. We are not forced to strictly comply with the backports policy, which force you, for example, to use testing versions or stable versions if you want to backport to old stable. We can pick whenever versions is useful for us, package it, and just use it in our repositories.  All those reasons are equally important for us. So the life cycle of distribution. So each version is supported for some years, let's say X. So we have first version, two years later there is another version, and so on. Each time we receive a new hardware, we qualify it with the latest stable release, or the much recent one available. So this one was qualified with Sabian 6, and this one happened in 2015, so it qualified with Sabian 7. And then there is our users which develop and use some business applications. And when they start writing a business application, they also are recommended, at least, to use the latest stable release available so that the life cycle of their business application lasts longer. When the basic, I mean, when the OS which was built on gets an end of support, we have some mechanisms to make them available on the newer versions of Sabian with some short mechanisms. So whenever you upload, for example, a business app for Sabian X, it gets actually compiled for Sabian X, and then the package is... So there is somehow a compatibility package which is generated for all other Sabian versions. So it's very convenient for users because they upload once, and they can use it on every environment. They don't care about which versions they are using on their, of the OS on their workstation. They just know that the application is available. They might not have all the performance that they could possibly get with the newer hardware, but at least they can run the application. So our engineers can upload business applications. They can do it in an autonomous way. And we wrote some specification for those applications. So we enforced them, for example, to not have maintenance scripts, no services, to put all the files in something under slash opt, to not collide with systems, system or Debian packages. So they just follow those rules, and the build infrastructure runs automatically some tests to say if the business application complies with the spec or not. So whether it complies, it gets uploaded and published, and if it doesn't comply, it gets removed. And each, like I said, each one is made available for each, for every available version of Sabian. So this is what Sabian is about, what we use it for, and how we do mainly stuff. So now I'm just focused on the HPC cluster side or the computing chains. So there are some problems when you try to deploy HPC clusters with Debian. So when you buy a solution of this size, of thousands of nodes, each manufacturer will come with its own solution. There is no way to ensure any compatibility between all the clusters you have. And for us, it's a big business issue, because you have to port each application for each cluster, and it takes just a crazy amount of time. So for example, for our engineers, spend at least 20 or 30 days to qualify a business application for each Debian version, and they have like 500 applications. So if they do that for every cluster, they just can't follow. So it's very critical for us. So yeah, like I described the point, there is no binary compatibility between clusters, and you can even have some conflicting stacks. So for example, with networking stuff with InfiniBand and Omnifat, sorry, each manufacturer comes with its own stack. So it's optimized for their hardware. They use the same libraries of the other manufacturer, but they integrate their own patches that are not directly put into the community. So it takes time. And you are forced to deploy the manufacturer version if you are expecting full performance from the hardware. So it's quite problematic because you are not, I mean, as a company with public money, we cannot enforce some specific technology. We receive whatever technology qualifies for some technical parameters. So first, it makes things more complicated. It gets better, but it's not there yet. There is also a large number of compute nodes. So it's nowhere near the scale of Google or Amazon or whatever, but it's large enough to be complicated to deploy in a fast way and reliable way. It's also not easy to get Debian support, so usually it's Red Hat or Suzy. So it's very common to find support for a hell, but for Debian, the first answer from a manufacturer is Deboit, sorry, they never heard of it. And it was even more complicated in the past because we had our own version of, I mean, Debian internally, which wasn't published. So they had to qualify their hardware, which an OS that is private. So we had to make some OS disks for them and solution maybe, et cetera, but that's also something that we try to fix by publishing Sabian to make it publicly available so that manufacturers and integrators can use it and test it on their own hardware in their labs to qualify it and use it. So the question is, do you know manufacturers actually doing that, doing what? Sorry. Well, you said you've published Sabian so they can test it and or check it.  So there are multiple things to say on this subject. So for now, Sabian is not fully published yet. We don't have the repository published, it's work in progress. It should be fully published by September, October. So we are almost there. So manufacturers cannot use it yet. But in the past, we made a lot of efforts to fully update and make OFED, so the software stack for InfiniBand functional in Debian, thanks to the work made by Anna here. And in the last bid, we just told them to use Debian 8 to see if their hardware is qualified for us or not. And it was okay for them. They were able to test it and propose some patches to make some newer drivers available. And we hope to make it even more easier in the future to make the, with, by making the software stacks of those manufacturers integrated in some repos of Sabian. So it will be much more easier to deploy clusters with it. And so I was saying that, yeah, with those big infrastructures, so the business users invest some amount of money to make it to 15 minutes. Okay, thank you. To buy that hardware. And they expected to use it rather quickly. Rather quickly means that from the time that the hardware comes to the data center to the day that I use, that are capable of running the first simulations, there is at most three or four months delay. So we have to prepare and advance some stuff and make it the more, make it more automatic and make it more easy to deploy and to test. And at the end, the ultimate goal is to get the, I mean, the highest performance possible. So you have to tune the system. You have to get the drivers right. You have to have the new, I mean, the correct versions of the stacks. And integrating them takes time and energy. Can I ask? So if you say three months, does it mean that the vendor, the hardware vendor, is supposed to install Sabian on it and just hand it over to you? Or are you going to deploy it on all the compute nodes? And if so, what are you using actually for that fully automatic installation or something else? We are using our own system deployment system, which I will talk about. And we don't ask them to install Debian. We ask them to make sure that the hardware is qualified for Debian or tell us where to find the driver. And we do all the software installation and the software integration. We only ask them to do the hardware installation because it can be tricky. But we take care of the software installation ourselves and make sure that before the driver, the hardware comes, it's already tested with Debian. So with Sabian, it's not only on OS. We try to standardize how HPC clusters are installed and how. So we define the pattern of architecture for a generic HPC cluster, on which we describe how to install it using packaged tools in Sabian, and then how to configure it to make it usable by your users. So we try to document that on this installation guide, which will be part of Sabian. It will also be moved to the Sabian namespace in GitHub, but it's not there yet. Anyway, it's available. And with all that, we have our deployment system. We call it Puppet HPC. The name is not... I mean, it's a deployment solution. For us, it's meant to deploy HPC clusters, but it can be used to deploy anything. You have many generic... When I say generic, it's very generic. Like, for example, there is a module for apetication in G. It only configures apetication G, and then you have another layer in Puppet to make it adaptable to your infrastructure. So it gets in two layers. You have a module to represent the HPC configuration in Yarra. So you have, on one side, all the code that configures your infrastructure. On the other side, all the data needed to configure it. And that's what allows us today to publish Puppet HPC in open source, but keep the private data internally. So it can be used by everyone, actually. And for us, it's another way to contribute to generic system installation for Debian and Cybian systems. It should work... I mean, it works without any change with Debian systems, because it's tested first with Debian. And then there are some stuff that are packaged only in Cybian, so they're working there, so no surprises there. For us, it's another way to contribute to build a community around Cybian. And that's all. It's fully... Well, yes, 70% of the modules are documented, but they are easy enough for a system administration to have a look at the code and understand what it does. And it's fully published on GitHub, so you can have a look at it and get you started quite easily. So why should you use Cybian? So first, it's still Debian. So we don't fork Debian, it's still Debian. We don't even change the kernel. So you stay compatible with the other machines installed in Debian. Then, since it's a derivative, we have our own way, our own rules to publish, to integrate stuff, etc. So we don't have to follow the policy of Debian backwards, for example. You have more relaxed rules. All the tools for deployment and other business applications are integrated in Cybian. So it's not the first open-source project published by EDF. We have also some business applications that are published like Code Saturn, Code Aster, Open Turns, Salome, etc., which are very popular in their field. And our aim is to also package those business applications inside Cybian. It's also an opportunity to meet other industrial users and have a base to contribute around. It's a solution that we tested on production. I mean, we actually use all what is presented today in projection. So it's not some pet project, but some IT team in their corner. And it's also an area where we can integrate some specific proprietary software stacks that is not possible to integrate in Debian because you are making choice and preferring one manufacturer over the other. So, for example, for the Infinity Band, etc., we have to deploy the community stack and not metanoxes or Intel stack to make it stay neutral and available for all the type of hardware. And you can find your own reasons to contribute to Cybian. Those are the ones that were obvious for me, but you can have your own ones. Okay. So what's next? We have a lot of things to do. We still have to update our website. We have to publish the packages. We have to still discuss with the manufacturers to convince them to publish their software stack as repositories and not only as tar balls to make it easier for everyone to deploy clusters. And we want to create some community around all that. So it can be integrators. It can be manufacturers. It can be industrial users. Everyone is just welcome to join the efforts and contribute to Cybian and, most importantly, to make Debian used on this kind of IT infrastructures. That was all from me. Thank you for listening. And if you have questions, I'll be happy to reply. Thank you for the talk. And I have one question about from the business side. Is it possible for the companies that have hardware, infinite hardware, for example, to test Cybian in beta mode? Like I said earlier, we will publish all our packages quite soon. I can keep you touched whenever it's done. When it's published, you can grab it and install it and test it. We have some Twitter account that is not very used, but all announcements will go through it. So you can still keep it. Okay. Another question in regards to the kernel side. So why you have to use the kernel of Debian instead of upstream kernel, plus the security patches from Debian? I'm not sure I really understand the question. I mean, Debian's kernel is upstream kernel with some security patches and some bug fixes. One thing that is important for us is to take into accounts all the environments. So that includes servers and workstations. So manufacturers might recommend some specific kernel version for HPC clusters, but it's not suitable for workstations, for example. And we want to keep full binary compatibility between all the environments so we cannot diverge from Debian's kernel. And yeah, and sometimes we take manufacturers stacks and we backboard them or port them to the Debian kernel because I already did that. It's doable either for the storage software like GPFS or Luster or for OFED stuff. Okay, I have a couple of questions. So you said Debian has a three-year release cycle, but I think in the last couple of years it was mostly two years. So what would EDF want Debian to have as a release cycle and or would it make sense to skip every second release? Have LTS for if you have two release, two-year release cycle, skip every second release and then have a seven to 10-year support for that and so not to have LTS for every release. Do you have any opinion on that? We tried to skip some releases in the past. We skipped WISI. We went from squeeze with the 3.2 kernel to jesse. It was a bad experience because when you're trying to port business applications from Debian X to Debian X plus two, it's harder than doing it gradually and for every release. So if you want to make the maintenance and the portage easier, you have somehow to follow Debian releases. That could be done in development. I mean, you don't need to deploy it that much or maybe I don't know. Yeah, but they deploy new versions quite often, at least every couple of years. So for now the release cycle of Debian is well suited for our needs and with what I showed earlier about this life cycle, we found our ways to work around the few things that weren't suitable for us. I mean, my main point is that I talked to several other companies and they also need LTS and if it's way longer than five years, telling the LTS team to support every Debian release for like seven years or something is not going to work. So maybe it's useful that some companies come together and pick a Debian release or every second Debian release and say, okay, we want to have LTS for that, but longer. But I don't know. Okay, we can discuss it. I have another question, actually. It actually reminds me of Thomson. That's another reason why people can take advantage of Sabian. I'm not pushing for using it. But when LTS stops, for example, when it stops for squeeze, we are still maintaining the security support for squeeze. And all that will come into Sabian. So it's another also reason to use it because it's still security supported and it's still suitable for using production. Right. Well, okay. My other question is more about the hyperphones computing in a sense that do you do any recompilation of packages? I mean, the problem sometimes I think is with Debian that, okay, we have AMD 64, but still we don't we don't use MTune native. So basically it's a low-scum denominator. Is there any performance problems so that your people say, no, we have to recompile BLAS? I don't know exactly what kind of scientific libraries you use, but do you have to recompile them or are people just happy with it? It's less and less true. It is less and less true that you need to recompile packages to get all the performance you can get. So some are in the engineers do it because they want to test all things, some weird compilation flags or some stuff like that, but it's mainly for R&D purposes. Our engineers use, so the packaged business applications. We are not even compiled on real hardware. It's compiled on a VM and not even with the HPC stack. And it works fine. And we made some comparison in terms of benchmarked. The same applications compiled locally on the cluster and with the version package. And we didn't find much difference between the two versions. So it's actually quite okay to use some... Anybody else have a question before I totally take over the Q and A? Okay, last question. What do you use for APC management? I mean, to schedule the workloads? We use SLURM on all our HPC clusters. And we contribute to SLURM a bit with new tools and code inside SLURM. Okay. I think we're running out of time anyway. So let's thank me again. Thank you for your attention.


So within Muslim countries that abide by Islamic law, there are certain restrictions on your speech There are certain restrictions on your behavior These kinds of restrictions exist in all kinds of societies. There are differences between societies based on Fundamental beliefs, but there is not something particular or unique to Islam That is the point that I'm trying so in in a video that I watched of you recently You said that you don't believe in equality No, I never said that which videos I say I don't believe I actually have the link for it


Perhaps playing, the sport I played was basketball and basketball is a notorious sport. It's kind of like football is in the UK, for example. The people who play football in the UK usually from lower social economic backgrounds, very mixed ethnicities. And they're not the types of people who generally go to work on Wall Street or in the city of London. But for me, I'd like to think that this is what I feel very passionate about because my interactions with these people is that there's extreme talent. I've always sort of thought of the world as in, there's a Serena Williams of the finance world just sitting there, waiting to be unearthed. It's just a traditional recruitment methods or the way that banks have seen the employment process before is so rigid that it hasn't allowed Serena to break through yet in our field. And so, yeah, Serena never gets unearthed. And that right there is one of our driving sort of ambitions is to make sure that every Serena out there not only gets discovered and unearthed, but also gets then fast-tracked and connected with these institutions so that they do get on that platform and can become who they're supposed to become. I think banks, if we think about it just from the bank's side, and we'll talk about the student side in a second, but from the bank's side, yeah, historically, look, they're changing, right? And they're aware of, of course, they're aware of the situation. I mean, diversity is the buzzword. And a lot of big banks are setting out really what looks like on the face of it some really impressive, ambitious sort of diversity plans. OK, but historically, of course, it used to be that banks would hire just from target universities. So it'd be the top five university. Let's just talk about the UK, but it would be the same in America or in Asia or whatever. We'll just hire from the top five unis because the kind of one-dimensional, quite naive thought processes, well, they're the brightest minds of their generation because otherwise, you know, how else would they have gotten into that top five? Now, straight away, of course, that means that you're assuming that everyone who's not in the top five is not bright and doesn't have any potential. Of course, there's a huge portion of people that have incredible potential that never get anywhere near to the top five unis not because they're not good enough or don't have the potential to be good enough. They're just where they've come from in their life. They're just so disconnected from that world of Oxford and Cambridge. I mean, well, I know they're two football teams, but do they do anything else? You know, it's like the university's not even on their radar. Their family's never been to university. You know, their families have never done A-levels, never mind going to university, right? And so they're coming from a place that can't get them to that stage by their early 20s, top five unis, and so they're entirely missed. The other thing is that the problem that banks found and one of the reasons why they're evolving is that they realized that they're hiring from the top five meant that they were hiring basically the same person and it became an incredibly one-dimensional workforce and they're all super successful academics. They've had an academic career where they've done nothing but succeed. And so, yes, they've done amazingly well at GCSEs, amazingly well at A-levels. Yes, they've got their place at Cambridge. Yes, they've smashed it and they're super academic. Success, success, success. And so the banks are like, right, they're the creme de la creme. We need those people.   Then they get to the trading floor and the harsh reality of a markets-based role is that markets don't always go up. Although, looking at the S&P chart, you might be forgiven for thinking that but markets don't always go up. You're not always successful. Sometimes you're gonna lose money and this is the key, right? How do you deal with adverse scenarios and these academic elite students? And again, I'm generalizing big time. So by no means am I suggesting that everyone at Cambridge has had an entirely smooth ride for their entire life but a lot have and a lot are not equipped and don't have the resilience to deal with adverse situations on the trading floor because they've never been exposed to it. It's through no fault of their own. It's just that their trajectory has not put them in a situation where they failed or where it's not going right or something's not working out as they thought and then they're just not equipped to kind of then deal with those scenarios. So banks recognize this. Now they're certainly put in place the wheels have started moving towards addressing this but if you look at the press and look at these big bold headlines, you know, Goldman's are now, you know, death only hiring or only sorry, Goldman's are gonna hire 50% females and 50% males. That's it, okay? And that's a great headline and it's great PR. You know, if you wanna be a little bit critical about this is great PR. But behind those scenes, fine, 50, 50, sure. But where are these 50 females coming from? Top five universities. It's like, well, okay, fine. You're trying to diversify in one way but you're not really truly diversifying. And I think that the, yes, the banks recognize they've got a change but the rate of change is fantastically slow. And the distance they've got than the track of change is way smaller than what you would imagine your perception is having read all the press around these big diversity initiatives that these banks are kind of put into place. So this is where we come in because to be fair to the banks, it's hard to change. You know, how can you find Serena at Banga University where she's studying psychology? How the hell do they unearth that person when Serena doesn't even know herself that she's an amazing market maker and should be working for Morgan Stanley? So this is Amplify Me. It is the platform where the entire global student community can come on for free, entirely for free. If you wanna work in finance, come on to the Amplify Me platform and have a go. And I mean, use the simulation technology that all these banks are using to actually train their new hires to get them ready for life on the training floor. Exactly the same training that you'd get if you're on the Morgan Stanley Summer Internship Program. It's free, it's on our platform, anyone, anywhere. And it's from your performance data. How do you perform in these simulated roles? This is how we're finding talent. This is how we're finding Serena. Now it's our challenge to make sure that Serena in inverted commas is aware of this platform and is aware of what it does and what it could do. So we need to get her on it. Once she's on it and she performs, then Morgan Stanley, come and check out this person. And it's about connecting the super talented and I don't care where you're from. I don't care what your gender is, what your skin color is, what your socioeconomic background is. I don't care where you are in the world. I don't care what you're studying. Can you do these jobs? Because actually I've been a trader for 20 years and I can 100% do this job. And I can 100% tell you that the most important attribute of a trader has got zero to do with academics. Zero, zilch, nothing. It's about resilience. It's about self-discipline. It's about staying in control, being rational and logical in a very volatile world. And that's got nothing to do with academics just because you've got a first from maths from Cambridge doesn't mean you're definitely gonna be good at that. You might be, but it doesn't mean you're definitely gonna be. Serena, a banger doing psychology, may well be equally as good or better than you doing a first at maths from Cambridge.


We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is The Therapy Show, behind closed doors podcast with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Welcome back to Episode 102, I can't believe we're this far ahead now. And this one is all about how to confront clients. That's an interesting title, Jackie. He says, I don't like confrontation, Bob, I never have. Okay, so we change the, let's reframe the word confrontation to challenge. Okay. I mean, no, you can use confrontation, but I think when I think of confrontation, I think that perhaps like a, I know it's a psychoanalytical word when you talk about things, when we talk about things, but I prefer the word challenge because I think it has a softer sort of feeling to it. Yeah. So when you talk about confrontation, I tend to think of challenge. So how do we confront stroke, challenge in psychotherapy? Well, it's an interesting one because if we go back to the contract, now I'm not sure if you do this, I'll be a good, I'll enjoy asking if you do. As you know, non-tracks is pretty central to TA from an adult to adult perspective. So when somebody comes into therapy with me, in the contracting stage, I usually will say, how are you in terms of me challenging you if I feel you're sabotaging yourself or some of your goals and aims are scripted. Okay. I don't do that. No. So usually I get some sort of permission in the process so that they are, well, not the more more they're ready for that, but they also agree from that, from an adult place. So it means that in the challenging, if somehow they, I don't know, they act out, I can say, well, do you remember at the beginning, we were talking about in psychotherapy sometimes, there's a necessity to challenge if I see the therapy going away, which is sabotaging your health or not what you want. Yeah. Which is a very good point. Yeah. Maybe I should do that. One of the things I do say to clients is, how will I know if you're angry with me, which is kind of along the same lines, do you know what I mean? What will I see if you're angry? So are you linking anger with challenge then? Yeah. Okay. So you're linking things like irritation and frustration to the impact of confrontation and challenge from you then? Yes. If I had questioned them or if I've done something to upset them, I would imagine that is a challenge or a confrontation in some way and they would have a response or a reaction to that. Okay. So we sort of, it's in the same ballpark. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. So I always do that so they, because obviously I think part of psychotherapy will demand challenge. Yeah. Because if that wasn't there, it's almost like why do they come to therapy in a way? Yeah, because when they're stepping out of the comfort zone, it is going to be a challenge. It is going to be difficult for them. So yeah.  Okay. Reminds me of a book that somebody lent to me when I went on holiday recently and it was written by, and I can't remember a name, but it was written by a forensic psychotherapist and she worked with people who really were either murderers, serial killers, people who really were inverted commerce, had really times in their lives. So she was working with those characters and she said quite frequently, which was heartening for me to hear, because I come from the same framework in terms of therapeutic technique, is that you really need to hear their story first, not only out of curiosity, respect and integrity, but as important to build up a relationship where there's some aspect of trust. Yeah. Before you do anything else. Yeah. And I suppose no-indo story and how conflict or challenges were dealt with when they were growing up is also going to be helpful, because for some people, being challenged isn't that bad of a thing, whereas for others it can be a really difficult thing to cope with. To be questioned or anything like that can be uncomfortable. That's right. In TA they call that process script analysis, where you're looking at how the script was started, formed, formulated and ended, if you like, or still going. Either way, I think build up a working relationship is so important when we talk about the timing of challenge. Now you are correct in terms of how a person takes challenge. I often think in terms of personality adaptations or personality theory, so for example, somebody who comes from a narcissistic place, find challenge more difficult than perhaps some other personality profiles, because they'll feel or could feel narcissistically wounded by any challenge against what they say, for example. Yeah. I think the different personality adaptations or disorders often are a guide to perhaps how a therapist will challenge or seek to challenge somebody when they are perhaps acting out destructive behaviors or acting out processes, which means that their goal or their contracts will be achieved. So I do think that's important to think about personality formulations. Yeah. And even people pleasers, like me, I'm a people pleaser, for me to be challenged or confronted in my mind means that I've not got it right, something's wrong, and that impacts on me because I'm a people pleaser.  When we're trying to just make everything into a Chinese puzzle. So there's lots of different things that play out when there is a challenge or a confrontation that needs to take place. Yes. You're correct. And it's not that therapists are not in the game of challenging people. In fact, I'll go back to my first statement at the beginning of this podcast and that is I think if a therapist doesn't challenge a person when they are sabotaging their healthy goals or they continue to get destructive behaviors, then the therapist isn't doing their job. It's not that you wouldn't have therapy without, you know, there's always be challenge in a therapeutic process. So that's taken us where it's how you do it. Yeah. And number one, I think, as I said, is building a working relationship, hearing their story.  So it's how you do it, not, no. I think you do it or not. Yeah, that's the question. So I said, build up a working relationship, get trust, do script analysis. Building a working relationship is so important in terms of trust and having the fertile ground which enables you to make the tentative challenges you're going to make. Another really, really crucial bit about the whole process of challenge in psychotherapy, the process is the idea of timing. In other words, when you do it. Yeah. That's almost as important as building up a relationship is the timing of the confrontation stroke challenge. That is absolutely important. Timing, I think. When in the therapeutic process, do you start to challenge? Well, yes. I mean, there's different types of challenges, aren't there? When you say start to make a challenge, I was thinking, oh, there's different types of challenges, sort of like a continuum of health. You can challenge in a way which might, the other person might perceive as a very abrupt or feel that being demeaned or whichever way you want to look at this. So start, yeah, if you want to put it that way, start in the challenging process. Yes. Now, the timing comes very, very crucial. Number one, again, it needs to be when trust has been established. Without trust, you aren't going anywhere. It has to be when the working relationship is being established. And I think it has to be, and this is, I think a fourth tip now, and it's a TA words again. So forgive me, people who perhaps don't know TA that well. It is when the child trusts you, not the adult, not the parent, but the child, the younger self, needs to feel safe with you before they can tolerate challenge, I believe. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, I'm thinking back now at the times where maybe I have challenged clients that that child, the way that it responds and reacts to that is interesting because I've had clients that kind of go into that rebellious younger self where they kind of get the hump with me. And then there's also the one where, you know, the more adaptive and apologetic when, you know, that's happened in a session. Which probably is the flip side of the adaptive child, you know, the compliant child on one side and maybe the angry or even the free child on the other side. But it's definitely the younger self. If you've got the younger self on board, in terms of them feeling safe with you, regardless of whether they become compliant or whatever, you've got a chance of the timing of the challenge being received in a way which the other person can tolerate not only hearing you, but reflecting on what you said. Yeah, yeah, without thinking it's a judgment or a criticism. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's it. If you're going to make a challenge about their destructive behaviors or the way they're acting out or the fact they're going, they're still keeping to their script or whatever it is, then they have to be able to hear that in a way that you're on their side and not against you. Yeah, which is why the word challenge is a lot nicer than, you know, conflict or confrontation. Yeah, it's a softer word. Yeah, definitely. And I think, again, I was reading this book on yesterday, this is where I remember it, and she was talking about, the author was talking about another person she was working with who was quite damaged. And she had to spend quite a long time building up a working relationship before she could even or how the receiver could tolerate her even speaking to him in the first place. So I think timing really is crucial in terms of the continuation of trust, the establishment of safety and the younger self believing or feeling safe that the therapist is on their side. Yeah, so once we've done that, once we've given it time and, you know what I mean, with the relationships formed and all those sorts of things, what if it's taken the wrong way? Well, let me just carry on. Yeah, that's a good question shall I get back to. I just want to just carry on a moment and talk about a concept in TA called strokes, which is a unit of recognition, and even more specifically, what is called a ball-sized stroke or a ball-sized transaction. And that's where the transaction hits all three eager states at the same time. In other words, it's accepted by the parent, heard by the adult, and believed by the child. So it's a really important transaction and it usually will provide reflection and insight by the other person. Yeah, I just wanted to say that because that ball-sized transaction is usually only really possible after working relationship and time is spent. Now, in answer to your other question is, which I think I'm hearing this right, what happens if the receiver, that's the client, either doesn't hear the transaction or the timing is inaccurate or the timing isn't the way that the therapist hoped it would be or the client acted out in some way. Is that what you're asking? Yeah, yeah. Well, I would actually say usually that's a mistake of delivery by the therapist or a mistake in timing by the therapist. Yeah. Yeah. Now, we did a podcast not longer, I think, on mistakes in psychotherapy, I believe. Yeah. They can be immensely valuable. Yeah, and can be something a therapist can really use only if the client feels safe enough to tolerate the mistake. In other words, the client feels, okay, that was a mistake or that was wrong or you hurt me here or this was said at the wrong time or whatever it is, but they can allow that to be part of the process if a working relationship has been established and trust has been established and the client at some level knows the therapist is on their side, even if they got it wrong this time. Yeah. And then of course, the therapist needs to take ownership of the mistake and say something like, oh, were you not ready to hear that at that moment or did you feel overwhelmed or was it the wrong time for me to perhaps have said this or was reflection of what I've said so painful and maybe we can come back to that. So they take ownership. Yeah. It's another psychoanalytic term. It can be seen as a relational term in therapy. They take ownership of the misattunement because if the therapist is attuned to the client, then mistakes are going to be less frequent. Yeah. Especially in delivery of transactions. Yeah. Absolutely. But there are some clients that I can think of that potentially wouldn't even let me know that I have upset them or the timing wasn't right. Do you know what I mean? Because yeah, they wouldn't bring it up. They might just disappear. They might just not come back again. Or what? Or if they stayed with you, what might they do instead? Not sure what you mean. Okay. So for you to have said that, you must have some thinking about either previous clients or even a hypothesis that you wouldn't know. I think that's what you said. If the time had been inaccurate or that they were hurt or there was some mistake in delivery that they would either adapt or go away or something else would happen. And I was thinking, well, I wonder what would happen then if you didn't know they were hurt or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's more that they would know that they were hurt, but they wouldn't bring it up with me. They wouldn't say anything. And then what would you do? Well, hopefully I've noticed a change in behavior. There'd be a disconnect there. And I would notice, do you know what I mean? That disconnection between the two of us. And let's follow this through. And then what you might do when you see the disconnection? Question them. Have I, have I said something that's upset you? Yeah. You'd account or take ownership of what happened. Yeah. That's what I meant earlier on. That you would take ownership and account for the misattunement, for the transactions, for the hurt, or even you would take account by querying or asking questions or reflecting. But what I suspect you wouldn't do is let it just pass. It wouldn't just at the moment pass. You'd probably inquire, even if it was by asking questions or reflections. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. If you were given the opportunity, I was thinking that there might be some clients who don't give you the opportunity. They kind of, after that session, they just leave because what you've done has hurt them in challenging them. And it's not what they wanted to hear. Because it's difficult for some clients. But in order to make change, we need to take action. And that sometimes can be difficult. So challenging a client is part of that taking action or making a change. And that in itself can be quite challenging. Absolutely. That's absolutely true. So let's just follow what you just said about somebody with doors or leaves. Yeah. Yeah. If that happens, I mean, we have talked in earlier podcast, but let's just take through what you're talking about here. If that happens, what usually happens then? There's many options for the therapist. Now, knowing you, I don't think the option I'm going to say next you would take, but I'm going to say it because this is one of the options. You could just say, oh, well, it was too much for them. Goodbye. And that would be that. Yeah. I don't think you take that one. I think you would think about this. You would reflect on what's been happening with therapy. And you'd find some way to complete the process and take account, even if it's only a way of finding a way to say goodbye. Exactly. Yeah. To have an appropriate ending. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And that is taking account of the process. Now, usually if you take account of the process, even if somebody leaves, so you phone them up or you leave a voicemail or send them a text or in the days of social media, you can do many other things. If you take account, take ownership and also remind them of the contract they had at the beginning, which was with you, to have permissions to challenge them if you see some of the behaviours which is unhealthy like withdrawing or passive behaviours or whatever it is. By reminding them, they will feel accounted for. Yeah. Absolutely. And from that, you may get a completely different beginning in therapy. Yeah. I think, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But I think it opens up a whole new area for discussion, you know, being challenged and bringing that back into the room and how that made them feel. And, you know, did you feel like you were being criticised or judged or, you know, did you understand that it was coming from a well-meaning, loving place and just, yeah, opening up a whole different conversation. Yeah. Staying in relational dialogue. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you are correct. They're so uncomfortable, the challenge or the reflection or taking ownership of their own scripted behaviours, that they may, for the moment, withdraw. Usually when people don't come back, as I said, if you take account of the process, I'm thinking one card here particularly, and invite them back to discuss what has happened in the process and remind them of the contract you had at the beginning around challenge and everything else. Mostly if you've got a working relationship which is good and they know that you're on their side, they often will come back. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only time really where I've had to challenge a client, I want to say quite strongly, is when a client's broke and I were contract, which I felt really, really uncomfortable about doing because it's only ever happened once and it was in the early days and I took it to supervision because, I mean, they didn't know what to do because they broke in the contract. And the bit was you cared about them enough to take them to supervision. You didn't just wash your hands at them. No. It's true. So I think this goes back to something I would give to the podcast listeners as a tip, is to put in their contracting procedures, if they do contracting procedures, and to talk about one of the duties, if you like, to use that word, or one of the roles, if you want to use that word, for psychotherapist, is to challenge a person if you see them moving towards unhealthy patterns or destructive behaviors, or keep putting a script on the road which isn't healthy for them. Yeah. Because you've always got somewhere to go back to. Yeah. Because you just saying that then quite succinctly or whatever, it is part of our duty to challenge the clients really. And why is it not doing our job there? We really aren't. Yeah, exactly. In fact, we're doing, we are doing something far more unhealthy, which is to collude with a unhealthy script or destructive behavior, which will mean usually a repetitive cycle and the client will just continue in that process and repeat history. Yeah, absolutely. And paying us to challenge them. That's not the main question for me. That's why I put it in the contract. It's how we do it. Yeah. I said three things, one, build up a working relationship, two, make sure the child feels safe with you. Three, are safe enough to tolerate mistakes or misattunements. And thirdly, and I think this does need to go here, is that you challenge gently. Yes. Not from a parent position. Yeah. Or if it does come from a parent position, you need to be fairly safe with the process that the person is going to hear it from a positive parent setting boundaries or whatever it is. Yeah. And not to repeat history for them, where they feel judged, demeaned, put down, dismissed, whatever ways we want to put this. Yeah. Which is possible. We can come from a parent's place without it coming across as being condescending or judgmental or any of that sort of stuff. It can be done in a nurturing way. Well, I think we have to, if we're talking about setting boundaries, helping with emotional regulation, helping with helping the person have a place to reflect on what's happening in the process, we often have to come from a positive, you know, nurturing, if you want to put it that way, parent. Now, I think what you're hitting on, you said it earlier on in the same sort of ballpark again, which is that maybe what you do, but the client still hears it negatively. Yeah. Because that's their history. Yeah. The question is what you do then. Now you can do many things. One of them is say, you know, I'm thinking, are you hearing this as negative against you or you're hearing this judgmentally? And if you are, who in your history spoke to you in this way negatively with dismissing the meaning you, because this is not my intention. Yeah. You really unusual for you to hear. So let's just discuss this for a moment. Yeah. It's not that we need to come to parent, because quite often, they haven't had a dependable, consistent, protective parent looking out for them. So it's very unusual for them. They're in an alien world. They've had the opposite usually. The toxic narrative. So it's, it takes a while for them to find a new calibration if you like. Yeah. And they can stand in a different way. Yeah. And I agree with what you said, you know, that it's kind of unusual for some clients in a therapy situation to be challenged because they kind of, I don't know, somehow think that you're always on their side and you're not going to pick them up on anything, even if you see it as being detrimental to moving forward or, you know, well-being or anything. It's like, yeah, it can be disruptive in the relationship somehow. If you have a sniff of them redefining and hearing the negative parent rather than your positive parent, you need to reflect and think, am I coming in a positive position in my voice tone, my inquiry, my, you know, you have to think about that. But if that is all lining up for you, then you need to inquire with the other person what they're actually hearing. Yeah. How does that fit in their history? Because it's not my intent to fit into your history. In fact, it's my intent to provide you a different experience. So you then have a space for relational dialogue. Yeah. Now that leads us on to another thing. Sometimes the positive parent, which I'm talking about here, just often nurturing, though quite firm, often accounting, and all the things I've just been talking about, may be too painful for the person to hear because it reminds them of what they didn't have. And then they might act out in a different way and push you away. But the job of the therapist then is to be like a terrier, if you want to look at this way, is to make every inquiries. I hear that you seem to be withdrawing or perhaps even feel a bit angry. Could you tell me a little bit about what's going on for you at the moment when I'm reacting to you this way? Yeah. So you search their subjective experience, rather than assuming something? Yes, that's the danger without the inquiry is that we do, well, I do make assumptions. Yeah. So it is important to inquire. And I think that's a really good point that you're saying, you know, the fact that they can reflect on something and the feelings that they didn't get from their parents, and that that in itself can be quite upsetting. Yeah, absolutely. And often is, and it's the end of mistake, if you would have put mistake and inverted covers here by the therapist would be if they stopped there without inquiring the extra step. And what's happening inside? Yeah. It's happening for you as I'm talking to you this way. You feel overwhelmed or I see that you've moved back a step or you seem quite ex and it's happening for you. So your voice goes down a bit. There's an increase of nurturing process. If they're so overwhelmed, they'll step back even more. Yeah. You need to inquire about what's going on for them, not to assume. Yeah. And this for me is the beauty about therapy because, you know, in a session, we get sidetracked or, you know, we have to take a sidestep to work on something that's come up in the session, not necessarily about the topic, but the reaction or the relationship in the room. Do you know what's most important, Jackie? It's the content of the session. Yeah. It's the process of the session. Yeah. It's what's happening in the process between two people, not necessarily the content. I'm not saying the content's not important, but what I am saying, what is far more important in my professional opinion is the process and what's underneath the content. Absolutely. But we do get caught up in the content sometimes. Yes, especially, you know, in the early days, I did. Yeah. And often if we're contract driven, because, you know, it's important that we have contracts and goals. And we, I think it's important to put that in the therapy car park, if you like. That's a phrase of my therapy car park. How long back? Yeah. But what's more important is the process beneath the contracts. Yeah. But you are right. We, you know, and if we do do that, and it's very, very straightforward, lots of therapy students, we do get so caught up on the content or focus driven in the achievement of contracts, we can miss the process. And I think the process, if we stay with the process, we get there in a much, we get there on the end, and we also get there in a much more subject, we get there taking account of the client's subjective history. Yeah. Yeah. Rather than our own assumptions. Absolutely. And with a much more robust, resilient client at the end of the day as well. Yeah, I, absolutely. So it's not that we aren't in the game of not making, you know, challenges or confrontations. It's, it's how we do it and what we do next. And what we do next usually, especially if there's misattunements, we take account of those misattunements and we inquire what's happening with the other people. Yeah. The other people, I mean, and their subjective experience. Yeah. With that, the building up of the working relationship and the therapeutic process means they're much more likely to be able to reflect, have the space, the relational dialogue to look at what is being put forward in terms of a challenge, if you want to put it that way. Yeah. I really enjoyed this, Bob. Thank you. It's an interesting subject, isn't it? It is. It is. And again, you know, the process of it all and the different layers and everything. It's, yeah, this is why I love my job. Can I just wait one other point? You certainly can. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's for transaction analysts. Well, it's for anybody listening, of course, but I'm using the TA model again. And I think you talked about timing early on. I talked the importance of timing. I talked about bullseye transactions. I think it's important to think about which ego state or part of the self the challenge is aimed at. Now, if you make the challenge to the parent part of the self, you risk competition. In other words, you risk the parent part going into competition with the parent part or what they perceive as the parent part of the therapist. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I can say that because it's really easy. Very easy. I'm very almost commonplace for therapists. If the challenge is made to the parent part of the client to go into the troubled waters of competition or at least to invite competition by the dysfunctional parent. Yeah. So what I'm suggesting is that the challenge needs to be aimed at the child ego state or the younger part of the client. Yeah. That's the last thing I wanted to say in the podcast, but a very important part because I've seen it many, many, many, many times in supervision when therapists get caught up with parental battles when they challenge the parent. You need to bypass the parent to get to the child ego state where they feel safe enough to reflect about their younger self in the surface of that relational dialogue. Yeah. Because I see that part of it is getting into the playing games, but if you do do that, there's a danger of getting into the parent competition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Another way of looking that of course is the Cartman Triangle. If you get caught up in that sort of persecutor rescue of business, which comes usually from the parent, you go around that triangle and repetitive processes or you need to keep off all that lot. Yeah. And the best way is to head towards the vulnerable child ego state. Brilliant. Okay. To stop. I just wanted to say that last bit. And it was a very important bit to say though. So until next time where we'll be talking about how to promote resilience in the therapy process, which I think follows on from this quite well. It does. And I thought about that when you mentioned the word earlier on, you were talking about resilience. It does really, really follow on from this. So I look forward next week talking about that. Okay. Thank you. Until next time, Bob. Bye. Bye-bye. You've been listening to the therapy show behind closed doors podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'll be back next week with another episode.


right there mcdonald's i'm scrapping the vlog i had scheduled for for this vlog that you are gonna watch because i'm passing through rochester minnesota which is my hometown and i'm passing my first place of employment like officially right and it's mcdonald's it's this mcdonald's and dude it's it's crazy being back here like like this is it that was my very first place of employment i'm gonna re i'm gonna reschedule uh my my other vlog but this is the vlog that i'm going with i'm literally gonna just order food at this mcdonald's and that's gonna be the end of the vlog i just i had to i had to put this in there i had to it couldn't be like uh oh and guess what this is where i used to work no it's getting its own vlog all right let's go order oh this is awesome so many good memories and so many bad memories at this mcdonald's hi there uh let's see here i don't know what to get um number uh number one meal please number one uh yes can i get 20 nuggets please uh barbecue and ranch is just fun that'll be all thank you don't judge me okay it's been a long day shooting and i didn't get anything to eat so uh i'm hungry all right let me i gotta pay for this food hold on i used to work at this mcdonald's i used to work at this mcdonald's this one yeah how long like like when i was in high school oh really like back in 2010 to 2012 that's a while ago yeah yeah like a long time ago and then i got promoted to manager in like five or six months that's me right now really that's you nice well thanks for the thanks for helping me out i appreciate it oh that's awesome oh man nostalgia bro nostalgia and like right over here to my right okay silver leg park let me tell you a lot of good times at silver leg park before i even got to like to mcdonald's i went to like individual places i used to hang out with a bunch of friends and i was just like oh yeah good times good times good times there lots of good times there oh the quick trip good times it's actually kind of crazy being back i'm not coming back to this town for a long long time because this week we're moving to a whole new different state a whole new different city thank you appreciate it oh man everyone's everything's like blocked off in here because of covid obviously this is it yo oh i hope you guys like this video honestly i it's oh man just nostalgia i'm not gonna cry i've already cried like 12 times no i'm not kidding no i'm kidding i'm not crying thank you all for watching uh this absurd video this uh stupid video of me just rambling about my my my upbringing in this town and my first job at mcdonald's i want to show you one more time there it is that was my first place of employment right there mcdonald's oh thanks for watching guys


What's up everybody and welcome to the Falcons final whistle podcast I am Atlanta Falcons comm digital managing editor Scott bear and I'm here with the crackpot team From the team website Tori McElaney Falcons beat writer and football analyst long-form features reporter man these titles are fun Chris rim is also here And we are here to break down a 34 to 30 loss the Falcons lost to the Washington football team We are still here at Mercedes-Benz stadium They have not turned the lights off on us yet And we are going to take the time over the course of this podcast to break down what happened and what it means in Totality and try to make sense of everything that fans saw here at this field But before we get to that we do have to give a big thank you to our sponsor Microsoft Windows 11 the official operating system of the NFL and the Atlanta Falcons The all-new Windows 11 is here to bring you closer to what you love Like this Falcons final whistle podcast learn all about the awesome new features of Windows 11 at windows.com And before we start our Falcons final whistle over the course of five minute Quarters there will be four of them and we're gonna break this thing down Tori generally speaking What were your thoughts about this game, especially how it ended? I just feel like I've seen it all before and I know we'll get into this But y'all can ask Chris. I called it. I knew it was gonna happen. I saw it happening I saw how things were unfolding and I was like I've seen this before and I'm about to see it again And I hate to tell y'all, but I was right. Yes, you were I mean my thoughts is just Devastating after last week you think maybe the Falcons even though it was a injured team and the Giants not the best team But they figured out how to win a tough game if in on the road They figured out how to win a game something that they couldn't do that they didn't do last year And then this week you see the team that we saw last year, right? So that that was that was my kind of takeaway from today Yeah, and we're gonna get into a lot of different details about that Including the fact that we listened to what you guys want to talk about and we're gonna incorporate that Into the course of this podcast as we go through a number of topics and we're gonna get to the first one here in the first quarter The first quarter is now underway And we have five minutes to talk about the way this game ended especially and what to make of it because the Falcons had an 8-point lead with about four minutes left. They coughed it up ended up losing this game in a fashion reminiscent to recent seasons especially a 2020 campaign where they let late leads go Constantly you guys all remember the Dallas game and the Bears game and the Chargers game and the Lions game and we can go on and on and on, right? So the question is Is it fair and appropriate for Falcons fans to say here we go again? I tried to delve into that in my column at Atlanta Falcons comm shameless plug number one And watched a lot of chicken little videos true story because I thought is the sky falling our fans screaming that the sky is falling When it's not or is it really and that's kind of how I tried to approach it I think the answer is we don't know yet because we don't know how this thing is going to go But Tori you cover this team last year you experience all those games that I just talked about Is it fair and appropriate for fans to go right back to having those 2020 20 20 flashbacks? I think it's incredibly validated that fans feel that way because they have yet to see anything that can Help them feel differently. I think that's what it all boils down to me is like, you know, we saw so many similarities to What happened last year to what happened tonight and in it At the end of the day, I feel like the fans kind of understand like yes This is new but it's like when it happens in a similar way When a loss happens in a similar way to what they've seen at time and time again like you can't help but to automatically be like Going back to that headspace of what it was in 2020 and I think for fans It's validated for them to feel that way now we can sit here and say all day long like oh This is something that's going to get turned around and like but we don't know that we don't know what the outcome of the next 34 years is because I do believe this is a 34 year I don't want to use the word rebuild because I know that's a hot button around here Yeah, a transformation whatever whatever you want to call a rebirth. Yeah Rejuvenation, I mean we could really get into the the terminology of it But I think we all know the gist of what I'm getting at and so for the fans It's just kind of like holding it like I really wanted this to be different, but it's not different yet It's tough to get out of that headspace Chris, where do you think just looking at this game as an individual entity? Where in the fourth quarter? Do you think that it went sideways? Well, I think specifically in the fourth quarter where it went sideways was when The pass that was lobbed high into the end zone That was in the fourth quarter when the passes lobbed high into the end zone and then which should have been an interception Which I think from that point probably because it felt to me at least it felt for a while Like the Falcons were a lead in by a lot more than they were actually right eating by it felt like the game was essentially theirs to me in like the third quarter and They were playing well, but the watch didn't just kept like converting on third down gosh, you're hurting on third down and then that played to me is when Things changed. Yeah, and then things started going downhill and downhill and then What we saw as the result It was one of those where the wind really gets knocked out of you like I was sitting there watching it And I you know you see Dante Fowler Kind of you know almost I feel like he almost had the sack like I thought it was I thought he was gonna be down like I I was like that's it like that was a great play whatever whatever and Then the ball floats into the end zone and you have TJ green at the back just kind of stand in there And then like they it's a touchdown and I'm like What in the world like it was a very much like takes the wheels Like off of any type of mobility that the Falcons had at that point I think it's just like the motivation the the momentum was just gone after that And I think too as a fan if you if you watch that if that's me and I'm watching that I'm just gonna think all here we go again, and that's exactly where everyone's head went everybody Yeah, and but the wacky thing about this is that if we look at the Giants game The Falcons go down and score they the defense forces a short drive from the Giants And then they go down and score again in this game Washington goes down and scores The Falcons offense does literally nothing with their opportunity We're gonna get it into that later and then Washington goes down and scores again It was the it was the bizarro world version of the Giants game It was exactly the opposite of that and the question is if nobody's willing to assume that that that the Giants game Means that they have it all figured out How can we assume that this Washington game means that they're going to revert right back to old things? So I'm not saying anyone's wrong for feeling the way that they're feeling I'm saying exercise a little bit of patience before we make a final judgment call The second quarter begins with a deep dive into what was a very short offensive series for the Atlanta Falcons that was Sandwiched between two Washington scores that ultimately decided this game and you look at the at the playlist It's not very flattering Mike Davis off the left end minus three Mike Davis left tackle plus four Matt Ryan short pass to Mike Davis again for five Then a punt by a guy who doesn't punt be because the punter was unavailable That sequence where that the Falcons had an opportunity to be closers and you can be a closer on offense by Bleeding the clock by running the ball well by being efficient Just keep those chains moving and demoralize and offense and put a lot of weight on a relatively inexperienced quarterback To go win it the Falcons didn't do any of those things To where it sounds we've talked about how how how pivotal that was and you seem to know right then that there was trouble a foot Yeah, well, it's so funny and I talked about this at the top of the pod But I was sitting there and I watched the Falcons go out there to take over with three minutes and 52 seconds left And I turned to Chris and I kid you not Chris can you back me up on this? Yeah, I turned to Chris and I said they're gonna go three and out right here And then they're gonna lose this game and I said that fully knowing the issues You know going back to that first question we're talking about issues from 2020 and kind of bleeding over into 21 It's because that's what happened all the time last year all the time It was because the offense couldn't convert a first down that was such a huge problem And it was a problem on first and second down where they were getting themselves in a situation where they had a Long third down to convert and that's kind of what we saw we saw might Davis get dropped for a loss of three on first down And so you're all you're already behind the chains You're already putting yourself in a really tough position To convert a first down and then the fact that it ended up happening the way that it did where it's like They had a three and out and then Washington gets the ball back goes down and scores with two minutes It's just like this is just the same thing again It's the same thing happening and the fact that I was able to be like yo Chris watch this Yeah, I'm not proud of it that I was able to do that, but it happened Yeah The the wild thing is the Falcons were 10 for 16 on third down going into that But it's all about how you perform in the clutch how you perform when it matters most and they weren't able to Get those things going and Chris here comes a mildly unfair question No, I'll ask it anyway It seems like a lot of people on on social media and this can just be a discussion point I don't want to single you out, but just it seems that there's a lot of discussion about maybe getting a little conservative With the play calling there. I'm not huge into second guessing what Arthur Smith is thinking But nonetheless, we saw some conservative play calling though that wasn't able to get 10 yards Do you take any issue there guys? Do you think that there's any problem with how the Falcons went about that series or was it more about at execution? No, yeah, it was about execution. I think Calling the I think the plate the play calls were fine I think you want to run the ball there You want to take time off the clock just in case you don't get the first down and then I think Thinking about if you don't get the first down you want to give Washington It's little time it's possible to move right on the field. So I I think the calls I think the play called conservative is fine there. I think but I think Cordero Patterson should have been on the field in that situation Before Mike Dave is not saying that just because he was the hot hand if you're if you're playing basketball Or playing football and someone's a hot hand. Give him the ball. So today Every time Cordero Patterson got the ball good things happen and good good things happen with Mike Davis, too I'm not because he scored a touchdown. Obviously, we don't people Today, but I think I really would have loved to see maybe on that second down throw a screen to Cordero Patterson Or you know do a stretch to Cordero Patterson and so that way they're both touching the ball But I think as far as the play calling I think the play calling was fair or smart It just just the execution wasn't there and that and that happens And coaches kind of take heat during during times like that when things don't work But not having Patterson out there for that series and and even on that final Hail Mary Did that make you raise an eyebrow toriated at all a little bit, but at the end of the day I mean I Maybe I'm coming at this from a different perspective Because I was a coach's daughter. I've never been one to like Yeah I've never been one to really question Why certain packages are in sure times unless it's blatantly obvious like that someone should be in like Cal pits should actually absolutely be in for a Hail Mary like for sure So I mean yes, I could raise some eyebrows and I probably do but I Tend to kind of just be like, you know what they had a plan. It just didn't work Yeah, yeah, and then I think that's ultimately what happened is the plan didn't work and they had Opportunities to do better. They probably could have and should have done better Ultimately, they fall short and this one We move on to quarter number three and we talked about offense in the previous period now We're going to delve into the defense, especially late We're going to talk a little bit about this defense as a whole but more specifically Let's start with the secondary here that we've seen veteran safeties back there and Eric Harris and Duran Harman a lot. We've seen Jalen Hawkins mix in What was your guys's evaluation of that safety spot of that defensive backfield seems like there were some Opportunities that were missed for those guys to make big plays that ultimately hit the turf Yeah, I think it was one of those things where it's like Eric Harris had two Opportunities to come up with a big interception Duran Harman had I think one opportunity in the end zone to come up with an interception and these are they're not like Balls that are you know not catchable balls like they were in their hands And I think that is what's tough is when you have these opportunities and you don't follow through with them And it was something that Arthur Smith even spoke about After the game and he mentioned these you know sure quote-unquote like Interceptions that they dropped and the fact that he kind of brought it up a couple of times was very interesting to me Because I think it goes to show how important those moments could have been For the overall scope of the game. Yeah, and I think I think going on for that point I think a positive for them at least for me tonight was that I thought they were tackling pretty well for the most part I think a couple times Yeah, the running back. Yeah, yeah outside of that But I thought Fabian made a couple nice open field tackles that we were even talking about So I thought they tackled a lot better But obviously that pick that should have been down there that I can't get out of my mind and down there I'm pointing to the end zone Washington's end zone. We're still at the stadium when TJ That was TJ green.  Yeah full-on box out. Yeah, and in his defense There were also, you know three other defenders in the area who are just kind of watching this this happen It was I don't know the word for the moment I don't know they were they were all expecting someone else to get the ball But somebody's got him got to make a play on that and I think that would have helped seal the game there So yeah, and then foyer mentioned it and then coach Smith also mentioned it So it was obviously a point of emphasis for them probably post-game or they all knew how much that mattered and you really You really have to look at what the defense was able to they had so many opportunities to kind of shut this Shut this game down to come out of this with a w and ultimately it just there's too many Opportunities that were left out there and that's how you lose games like this, right? Like that's how things get out of hand and you feel like you could seal it and ultimately, you know They just weren't able to do that. I thought defensively. They had some nice pockets of of play I thought the past rest wasn't altogether terrible But you you let Taylor get out and make some runs and slide and ultimately all those missed opportunities You make one you make one this game has changed you and they had several of them that they weren't able to come through with Yeah, I mean that was my entire like post-game takeaways was just I made the comment. I was like In the when I was riding I was like, you know, it's like a flood With you know a flood starts with one drop of rain and then it just accumulates over a Larger period of time and then all of a sudden you're like knee-deep in water That's really what the Falcons kind of had to go through at this point It wasn't just one thing that it's like, oh like it, you know, this happened and we need to get better here It was an accumulation of a lot of different things over the course of four quarters for sure and that's why I think it could Drive you insane. Yeah, if you're a player foyer his body language told me like he couldn't believe what just happened Like it seemed like there was kind of this inner not aggression But he was just like like how did that happen like he just couldn't wrap his mind around it at the time Yeah, and ultimately I think that that's why this game is It's gonna stick with them and we're gonna talk in the next quarter about hey, you know How can they move forward? How can they not let this bleed into the next game? But that's why it's got to be so frustrating and that's why I ultimately And I tried to write this to that Hey Like the fans that were here the fans that invested their time and money in this product like they have a right to Be frustrated the players have a right to be frustrated because there were so many opportunities One other thing goes right and this thing is sealed. That's why I'm with you Chris There was a lot of times where I felt like Falcons got this one right that that I really felt that way and I thought you made a great point, too I thought the score was was I had my it was a lot different than who we thought it was Yeah, yeah that it felt bigger It felt like the Falcons really took control in that third quarter and then ultimately it You know it kind of leaks out That's why I think it's fair that we that we look at the offensive series We look at the defense special teams gives up a hundred and one yard kickoff of return for a touchdown that there's plenty of Blame to to go around for this disappointing loss And we're on to quarter number four with what's a very important question now that this game is In the rear view and that's where do the Falcons go from here. They have an upcoming game against the New York Jets That's another very winnable game It's also in the United Kingdom and that adds a whole number of Complications and a good question that that Tori wrote down here How does Arthur Smith make sure this loss doesn't linger that that's an important thing to look at as we move forward any suggestions any Insight about how about how he might go about this given everything that we've heard from him after previous losses Any thoughts about about how he can get this team forward and avoid having one loss turning Turn into two or maybe more. Yeah I think that's like so important when we're talking about the difference in what Arthur Smith Is trying to put together here because I think there are too many times that losses lingered in Previous regimes and in previous seasons. I think that was a very very big issue in 2020 I think that's why you saw the losses accumulate the way that they did it almost I wrote one time I was like it feels like this is the identity of this team So the fact that Arthur Smith can has an opportunity to come in here and be like, okay, this happened It looked a lot like last year. I know you a lot of you were there. I know a lot of you felt this way Let's figure out how to knit this right in the butt because that's so important for this era And what Arthur Smith is trying to put together in Atlanta He has to be able to get this team in a good headspace going to London Which is weird in and of itself to that London game But to have to play that game after a loss like this. It's like There's a lot riding on this week Especially kind of heading into the bi-week after they I think I just feel very very strongly that this is a really really important Time for Arthur Smith to really get a hold of this team and really put his stamp on it to kind of be like look I know this wasn't good But like we have got to figure out a way to make sure it doesn't happen again and really and truly like Make this team feel that way because it's one thing to say that Because I feel like you know previous coaching staffs had said had said that before too You've really got to make this team feel like this is different. Yeah, I guess I always say them I think the thinking about the questions a little a little bit Hard for me because I think nobody wants to lose right like nobody's trying you know me Being like hey, let's lose. Yeah, no one's really trying to lose and like I think there's only so much you can say as a coach to your team to say Guys, I don't want to lose. You don't want to lose. We are better than this. You know, how many different ways Can you say that I think at the end of the day It's about having the leaders in the locker room who guys respect along with you who I think believe in your message Who also are bringing the message so guys who people respect in the locker room who are also Saying that message is saying, you know, trust trust what coach Smith is doing. There's a plan stick to the plan We we just made a mistake here. It's not we don't need to reinvent the wheel here We just made a mistake here trust what he's doing I think if he has those people that people respect from you know, Eric Harris or Matt Ryan or Lee Smith The rock guys like that who are also in the locker room talking to their position groups and let and reinforcing what the coach is saying We're better than this and we can move forward I think that's that's the way to go about it and then just preach it to the team execution because Limiting mistakes and I think that's all you can do because you know giving a speech and and all that is great but at the end of the day you need to execute and Say he's gonna say all the right things as he has been since training camp But I think it's just about executing it and making sure that the message is uniform from the from the top down Yeah, and I think that Matt during his press conference at the very end He talked about being proactive to make sure that the right mindset and the right attitudes and the right You know not techniques But but that this team was doing what was necessary to prepare well for the Jets game and to Continue really let's be honest that they started this season with two pretty rough games found a way to come back in that week Three opportunity maybe they didn't build on week three right away like they were hoping But we don't know where this team is going to go from here The bottom line is that I go back to what Arthur Smith said earlier this week After that Giants victory in his Monday press conference and he was basically like look can we make the next step? Can we make the next step? Maybe they stumbled a bit that doesn't mean that they're gonna stop walking, right? That that can they make that next step can they get a little bit better? So heading into the buy they feel like these are areas where we improved and these are fixable areas where we can continue to improve This is a long season the season's gonna have ups and downs. That's what happens with new But ultimately I think if they can continue making that type of progress make this game more of an aberration Make the Giants game at least in the fourth quarter more More of what we see in the future that that's how you have to respond moving forward Thanks everybody for joining the Falcons final whistle podcast after a disappointing result for the home team a 34 to 30 loss to the Washington football team and thanks as always to Microsoft Windows 11 for the sponsorship and now it's up to you guys Head over to iTunes Spotify Subscribe, please that would be nice leave a rating. We prefer it to be five stars I think how about a review some nice words would be greatly appreciated and Keep on coming back because we are gonna have Falcons final whistle podcast after every single game as we Chronicle the course of this 2020 season. There's been a lot of ups. There's been a lot of downs It's never dull always interesting with this Falcons team and we'll see what happens next. We'll talk to you next week


Alright, let's do the questions. How tall are you? 6'9", I think. Oh, nah!  How long have you been playing basketball for? All my life. Same. What size pair are you? 15th. Ugh, it's a hard pair. It's a hard size. What's on your feet today? Jordan 6K54s. And what's your go-to ball shoe? Jordan 4 Georgetown Piers. It's so good to not have to look down. Isn't that? Yeah, it's not... Do you feel that? We're on another level, though. We're on another level. Yeah, head and shoulders above the rest. Yeah.