Thank you all for making it to this talk. So this talk is Kubernetes bees, what bees and Kubernetes have in common and how bees have solved many other problems that Kubernetes solves and that we have in distributed systems except 100 million years ago. So this talk was supposed to be together with Simon N, a colleague and friend of mine who unfortunately was not able to make it. So you'll have to make do with me. My name is Chris, working at Gipod. So few disclaimers to begin with. First, much like there is more than one way to build a distributed system and much like there is more than one way to run Kubernetes, there is more than one way to do beekeeping. And the views presented in here are a very Eurocentric view of this practice. There is a strong cultural element to beekeeping and we do not represent the entirety of all practices that exist. We'll also very specifically talk about the kind of bees that we'll find in these areas, so specifically the north of Germany and the middle of the UK. The purpose of this talk is to leave you with an increased appreciation for bees, their complexity and the analogy of problems that they face and that we face. And with that, let's get right into it. The things that we're gonna talk about is predominantly bees, specifically apis melefera, which is a type of honey bee, a cultivated type of honey bee, so we're not talking about bumblebees or anything of that sort. Bees in our analogy here are the workloads. It is the workloads and the people who work with things. So there are three main types of bees. One is the worker bee, and we're gonna talk about that first, then there are drones, and there's what's known as the queen. The worker bee are a strange combination of what in Kubernetes you would consider a pod and people who operate those pods. And they go through a series of steps along their career. So they start out as an intern and they get to clean up the things that others didn't wanna clean up. That's the first three days in the life of a bee. Then they move on into a sort of DevOps and delivery role where they help bring new bees, i.e. workloads into life. So they're literally nannies that feed other bees and help them get out of their comb. Then they become builders, which in our world would be the equivalent of an SRE. They quite literally built honeycomb. They quite literally produce wax and they stand the infrastructure that the rest of the hive runs on. After that, they move to the blue team where they prevent bad actors from entering the hive. So they're quite literally god bees that stand god at the entrance and followed by becoming a forager. And when you normally think of a bee, this is what you would think of. You would think of the one that flies around and goes to flowers and collects nectar and pollen and brings it home. That's only 20 days, only half of the entire life of a bee. So let's do a show of hands. In those 20 days, how much honey do you think a single worker bee produces? Who thinks it's less than one gram or 28 of an ounce? All right, I wanna say that's about a quarter. Who says it's five grams, about a fifth of an ounce? Wanna think that's about the same, hands? And then 10 grams, a third of an ounce. I think that's about half. It is really less than a gram. It is 0.5 grams on average, 156 of an ounce of honey. That means to fill one jar of honey, you need the life's work of a thousand bees. The reason bees live 43 days is because they quite literally die of exhaustion. So they keep collecting and collecting and eventually they just can't collect anymore. So a single jar of honey represents a thousand bees. Let's talk about drones. So that was the worker bee. This is the bee that makes the worker bees the most common bee. It makes the mass of bees in a hive or put into the Kubernetes world. It's the mass of workloads that you would run. And then there is a drone. And the drone doesn't have a good equivalent in this example or in this analogy. You could think of it as a way to bootstrap the hive. In nature, the purpose of a drone is to ensure genetic variants within the bees. They do have a service discovery aspect. So drones and Virgin Queens meet to introduce genetic variants. And they need to discover where they would meet. And the way that happens is through the use of so-called drone congregation areas. So there are specific areas that drones fly to and that Queens fly to where they meet. And there are about 100 meters in diameter and they can contain drones for more than a hundred different colonies. So thousands of drones. And the interesting thing is we humans have absolutely no idea how they do it. We don't know how they identify those areas and we don't know how they, how to do that kind of service discovery. And yet drones as well as Queens are capable of doing this. So they're capable of, most of the best theory we have is that they can detect landscape features to find those areas. Now we don't understand how they do it. So you might be wondering, how do we produce maps like that? We produce maps like that by sticking tiny antennas onto bees and then we use harmonic radar to track their flight path. And this is how we study the flight behavior of bees. There is a out-of-resource pressure eviction. So in Kubernetes when a node runs out of memory, out of disk space, it will start evicting workloads. And the same thing happens in bees. As the winter nears and food gets more scarce and there are fewer queens that would need drones to match, drones are evicted. And in English this is quite literally called drone eviction. In German this has a very poetic name. In German this is called Dronen Schlacht which literally translates to the battle of the bees or the slaughter of the drones. Let me show you how that looks like. So you see here the two bees sort of fighting and the lower the bigger one is the drone and the upper one is a worker bee. And you might be wondering, how is it possible that this tiny bee can manage to fight off this big one? And we're just saying this is a resource starvation situation, right? We're running out of resources. And so the drones just no longer get food. Drones are incapable of feeding themselves. They cannot sustain themselves without the help of worker bees. And so worker bees just stop feeding them and so they get weaker and come eviction day they cannot fight back. The queen. Intuitively we think of the queen as sort of the head of state and the name would imply that. In reality, the queen is really just one other function within a hive. And in our analogy to Kubernetes, the queen is really a horizontal pod autoscaler. So the horizontal pod autoscaler will increase or decrease the number of replicas in a replica set depending on different signals such as CPU or memory needs or requests per second. The queen does very much the same. What a queen does is she lays eggs and scales up and down the mainly scales up actually down as a natural process the population within a hive. And so here you see the average colony population as it happens over a year. Again, this is a very Eurocentric view and this curve will look very different than in other parts of the world. What you see here is that we go from a mere 5,000 bees in the winter to up to 60,000, 60,000 bees in the summer. Now let's do the show of hands again. How many at their peak, how many eggs can a queen lay per day? Who thinks it's 500? It's about five hands. Who thinks it's a thousand? That's considerably more, I wanna say a third. And who thinks it's 2,000? That is the vast majority and you are indeed correct. So a queen will be able to lay or bring to life, so to speak, 2,000 bees per single day. There is a failover mechanism that does not exist in Kubernetes. In Kubernetes, if your horizontal pod autoscaler goes missing for whatever reason, it is not automatically replaced. Whereas with bees, if the queen goes missing, that does happen. So when the queen goes missing, the hive will recognize that and will take existing brood to rear a new queen. So what they'll do is they'll take existing larvae and feed it with an excess of so-called royal jelly or chaleureale, which is a very nutrient-rich mixture. And that's the only difference between a worker bee and a queen bee is what they were fed when they were young. Should there be no brood anymore, worker bees can also start laying eggs which are then not fertilized, and so only drones will come out and the hive is doomed to fail. So these are the different types of workloads, the different types of bees. Now there is communication. It's a distributed system, so they need to talk to each other. And one common pattern that we see in cloud native applications and in applications that run in Kubernetes is using a PubSub mechanism, something like NATS or Redis or RevitMQ or something of that sort. And bees have several PubSub mechanisms. One of them is known as the waggle dance. And the purpose of the waggle dance is to demonstrate where there is food to be found. So one bee flies out, finds nectar or pollen, and then comes back to the hive and if there is enough food for other bees to gather, the one that just returned will advertise where that food is to be found. And it will do that by walking in a figure of eight and on a straight line will waggle their tail. And the angle at which they do that indicates the angle of the food where the food is to be found with respect to the sun and the length of the dance indicates how far away that food is, roughly one second per kilometer. So let's see how that looks like. So you see the bee walk in that figure of eight and shaking their tail and that tells all the other bees around where to find nectar. The very same mechanism, the very same sort of PubSub mechanism is also forming, also forms the basis of quorum which we'll see later. There are other PubSub mechanisms, specifically pheromones. And pheromones are widely used in between different participants in the system and for different purposes. So for example, the queen emits two pheromones, nine ODA and five HDA, which you can think of as a health endpoint. And that's really what it is. It's sort of the life-ness check of that queen. And it tells the rest of the hive that there is still a queen here. You don't need to produce a new one, please don't. It is also something that really calms the hive and you can tell the difference. If you approach a hive that has a queen versus one that doesn't, the one that doesn't will sound very aggressive, whereas the one that does will sound very calm. Worker bees also emit pheromones amongst each other. And so there's for example, the alarm pheromone. The alarm pheromone unsurprisingly is an alarm signal, something is wrong in the hive. Now the alarm signal is chemically very similar to bananas. So don't eat a banana and open up a beehive because that immediately triggers the alarm signal and you might be confronted with 60,000 very unfriendly creatures. There's also the Nazanov pheromone and the purpose of the Nazanov pheromone is basically a you are here signal. And it's again part of a, if you're so like stretching this a bit, service discovery mechanism where it tells the bees where they need to go. And so the way this is used is that bees will hang on the warm summer days. You'll be able to see that they'll hang outside of a hive and they'll fan air out. And part of it is to cool the hive. The other part is to tell incoming bees where they need to go. So it looks kind of like this. They just hang outside and they fan their wings. And what they do here is they really spread this Nazanov pheromone in a stream outwards. And it's kind of like a landing strip that tells the incoming bees where they need to go. This is really helpful when you have multiple colonies right next to each other. Where otherwise there might be a chance of confusion. There's also more direct one-to-one communication. You know, things that we might be using something like GRPC or REST style APIs for. Bees have something similar. And it's called, its scientific term for all I could decipher is the whoop whoop sound. And the whoop whoop sound is used as a means of collision avoidance. So a beehive is a rather crowded place. And they need to avoid bumping into each other. Let me show you how that sounds. So that was the whoop whoop sound. And the way they do this is by disconnecting the muscles from their wings and then vibrating really quickly. And that sends a vibration through the honeycomb and tells the other bees that hey, don't bump into me. Honeycomb is a really good segue. Honeycomb in this case is pretty much our nodes and control plane in one. So when Kubernetes we have multiple nodes and we have a control plane that controls it all, essentially, honeycomb acts as both in one. So first off, it's quite literally the thing that bees run on, pun intended. It's also the place where they collect and store the nectar and then turn that into honey. And so this is an important thing to know. Bees don't actually collect honey. Bees collect nectar and then they turn it into honey. And there are two key differences between those two substances. One, nectar has about 80% of moisture content whereas honey has about 18, 18% of water content. And honey has gone through bees, so to speak, multiple times. And every time they add enzymes that make the honey more durable and antibiotic in the end. And this process happens on top of honeycomb. So what you see here is at the bottom, the sort of glossy stuff is basically nectar and honey in preparation and the covered stuff is honey that has reached the required moisture content of 18% and then it gets capped. And this is one of the many ways that bees do state management on top of their control plane, on top of honeycomb. So once honey is done, they'll cap it mainly for preservation reasons but also to show that nothing no more needs to be done to it. And it helps beekeepers understand when that stuff is ready to be harvested because it's capped and that's a good indicator that now is a good time to pull it out. Honeycomb is also used to grow the bees themselves. And so what you see on the far left are the eggs that the queen laid. And then the further we shift right we go through the different stages that it be grown in. And in the end again it gets capped and you'll notice how the capping here looks different. It's much more yellow, it's not as white. And in there the bees will take a few more days until they're ready to basically bite their way out. And so whenever you pull a frame it's very likely if there's brood on it that you'll be able to see a bee trying to make its way into this unknown world. We also spoke about the queen as a horizontal pod autoscaler. And the size of honeycomb determines what kind of brood gets laid in it. So the queen doesn't actually get to make that decision. This decision is made by the bees as they build the comb and the size determines what gets put into it. And so again pulling this back to the control plane analogy. Like if you think of these individual cells as resources they tell you, they give you information about what needs to happen with that. So specifically worker comb is about five millimeters measured from flat to flat side. Drone brood is about 6.4 millimeters or quarter of an inch. And then queen cells we spoke about that auto failure, failover mechanism in the autoscaler that then grows up to 8.5 millimeters. Now the difference between a worker egg and a drone egg is that the worker brood is fertilized and the other isn't. Which also means that drones don't have a father. So male bees only have a mother, not a father. You might be asking why is honeycomb shaped the way honeycomb is shaped? Why are bees doing that? And the reason is it is the most efficient way to build this structure that with regards to how much material do you need to build the walls and how much surface do you get out of it? It is also the only polygon that tessellates across the plane. So take this example, when you look at the triangle we need six pieces of outside wall to fill four triangles of surface area. Whereas with a polygon we can use those six pieces of outside wall to produce six pieces of surface area. Again, we humans don't really know how they make this hexagonal shape or this polygon shape that we all know of honeycomb. The best theory we have right now is that they build something that's essentially cylindrical and then they shape it into the shape we all know. So we've spoken about the workloads, we've spoken about nodes and the control plane, and then there are clusters as a whole. And in this analogy, clusters are the hives.  This is what a modern so-called Langstroth hive looks like. And most sort of Western styles of beekeeping use some derivation or another of this kind of format. And so what looks like essentially server blades is really individual frames where the honeycomb grows in. And then the different levels are used for different purposes. So at the bottom, the deep super is where the brood grows and then there is what's known as a queen excluder. It's basically a grid through which the queen cannot go. And on top is where the bees will put the honey. And so then we humans can just take the honey and extract it. There's also multi-cluster setups which is actually the most common way of keeping bees where you would have multiple hives standing next to each other. And you might have seen the colorful paint that gets added to bee hives. And that's not just decorative. It also helps the bees actually find their home. So as they leave the hive, they'll circle around and sort of scan the area that they're in and they remember the color of the hives that they left from. There is an admission controller that exists for hives. So admission controller in Kubernetes will reject workloads that we want to run on it or not. And something similar exists in bee hives. So if bees that are not part of that hive or say wasps or bumblebees or anything else tries to enter that hive, that will be rejected. And the way that looks like is a bit like this. Again, you see one bee trying to convince another not to enter that hive. And these are the guard bees that we spoke about earlier that are part of sort of a worker bee's life. Control loops. Control loops are one of the, if not the core concepts in Kubernetes. So at KubeCon in Valencia, there was a talk that looked at different real world principles and ideas and how that applied to Kubernetes. And one that was specifically given emphasis was control loops. And so what they do is they take a desired state in the real state of the world and then they'll perform some action to produce that real state of the world. And so in a Kubernetes context, think of that as I want five replicas of some workload and then there's a replica controller that will produce formal replicas just so I get to this number. And bees run a host of control loops themselves. So specifically looking at temperature and humidity. The chart on the left shows the temperature inside this particular bee hive that was looked at. The green curve is the outside temperature and the orange curve is the temperature within the hive. And you'll notice how it's approximately stable and little disturbance from the outside temperature makes its way to the inside temperature. And they do maintain that within sort of a perfect brood temperature range. Humidity is even more impressive. The blue curve is the outside humidity and the green curve is the humidity within the hive. And bear in mind that in that time when this was measured they'll collect a lot of nectar so they'll import a lot of humidity and they manage to get all this humidity out to keep the overall humidity within the hive stable. There is a failover mechanism that exists in bees that does not exist in Kubernetes. So if the hive runs out of space, so to speak. So for example, in Kubernetes, if you can no longer schedule because you don't have any more nodes and you also cannot get more nodes because I know you've reached your quota limits, for example, or you don't have an autoscaler, you just don't schedule. Bees, in turn, will basically create the equivalent of a new hive. So think of this as your Kubernetes cluster doesn't work anymore, so it's just gonna go and create a new one. And that's literally what bees do. The process is called swarming where approximately half of the colony will decide to just go and find a new home and create a new hive. The way this works is that they'll all stream out of the hive and it literally looks like pouring bees out with a fire hose. It's quite impressive and a little bit scary to see that. They'll then find a spot where they'll come together and after that, a search for a new site happens. And this search for a new site happens when scout bees leave, try and find a new place three to five meters above ground. Ideally, bees have been there before. And then they'll come back and they'll advertise for what they found. So, and the advertisement happens through the waggle dance that we saw earlier. If another scout bee will see that, they'll go with that original bee and look at the site that was found. And this process is repeated until enough scout bees have decided that this is a good site. So there is a quorum mechanism by which the decision is made where to go next. And once that decision has been made, the scout bees will emit what's known as the piping signal. And the piping signal sounds very similar to the whoop whoop sound. And it's basically a, ladies and gentlemen, start your engines because all those bees, very tight in this, hanging very tightly together, if they all were ready to fly at 35 degrees, they'll just boil. And so they don't do this, they cool down and then when that piping signal comes, they all warm up and get ready to fly. So, sum this up. We've seen that a lot of concepts that exist within Kubernetes also exist in the real world, specifically within bees. From auto-scaling to failover, even failover modes that Kubernetes does not yet support, to service discovery, role-based access control. We have not spoken about metrics. Bees emit a variety of sounds, weight, count, temperature, et cetera, that we as sort of operators of those clusters can use to gauge how well they're doing. There are means of message passing. There is a concept of time and there's quorum. So in conclusion, inspiration for solving our problems can come from pretty much anywhere, specifically things that look so tiny like bees. And I know this is a really lofty conclusion. So I'll end on something that's a bit less lofty. These are pretty awesome creatures. Thank you for your attention. And with that, happy to take questions. There's a microphone coming, I believe. The question was, can you define quorum? In this case, I would define it as sort of a majority decision, basically. So there's not consensus. It's not that everyone agrees. It is that there's a majority that agrees. So the question was if there were any other metaphors that I liked, but that did not fit the mold of the story. We thought to, like my co-author and I, we thought to pull this a bit, like structure this along sort of this a distributed system, this is what Kubernetes does and then this is what you can run on top of Kubernetes. And we did find metaphors for these individual points, but as you noticed, some of them were stretching the analogy already and for structuring this way, we found that most would have, yeah, strained this beyond credibility. Hi, you mentioned in the beginning that you're looking at bees in two very specific areas, but why was that? Why not bees in general? Are the bees significantly different and match more with, I don't know, hypervisors or something? Yeah. So there are several reasons. One, Simon and I, we are both beekeepers. We keep bees ourselves. And the ones that we spoke about is just what we're most familiar with. It is something that we've very intrinsically or intricately looked at, whereas other bees, some behave similarly. However, there are about four or five types of honeybees that behave in the way I showed. Wild bees, for example, behave completely different. Most of them are solitary creatures that don't form hives and don't exhibit sort of similar behaviors of distributed systems that we saw here. So part of it is, this is what we know, part of it is some bees just really behave very differently. It's a great metaphor, but is there any design inspiration we can take in terms of implementing new features or strategies based on honeybee? So the failover modes are particularly interesting where, for example, the cluster essentially replicates itself in a way. I'm not even like, when I think about needing to operate something, I'm not sure I would like that. Also thinking about cloud cost. But this is one thing, like the many ways that bees can failover, the resilience that is built into the system is astonishing. And goes, like Kubernetes does a really good job of that. What bees do goes way beyond what that system can do today. So if any, I would say it's that one. So earlier in the talk, you had the heat map showing where the bees kind of were and you said that there are antennas attached to these. How do you get the antennas on the bees? Painstakingly. So marking bees with something is actually quite common process. So queens, for example, are commonly marked, sometimes with kind of little stickers. And so there is glue that does not hurt the bees and the outer shell is a Hineen. So you can stick things to that. So the way you add the antenna is you catch a bee and you glue that antenna to the back. How do you catch the bee? Great question. Bees are super calm creatures. So you can pull out a frame and they'll just walk around as if nothing happened. And so one way you can catch them is quite literally you can just pick them off and they'll do nothing. Cool, thanks. My father is a beekeeper. I think this is fascinating and I love the metaphor. I'm wondering if you can extend it further and comment on the role of the beekeeper in this versus the role of humans working on distributed systems or their lessons we can take away in things like doing maintenance in a non-impactful way, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, that's a really great idea. I briefly alluded to this when showing the overview of how concepts that bees have and that we have in sort of this world or in the Kubernetes world overlap. One thing that we did not speak about is exactly what you alluded to, the role of the beekeeper. I would think of us as sort of operators, really, operators of those clusters and hives we do use signals and we do use observability into those hives. So if you wanted to stretch that, you could say that, for example, the sounds they emit or the weight of the hives is kind of like a count of what's happening. So there's a whole host of signals that you can pull out. Most of it is through manual inspection. And so here maybe there is something that we as beekeepers can learn from this community where this community puts a lot of emphasis on automation and good observability. In beekeeping, it's a very manual process and the equivalent is literally do a cube control get pod on every single pod in your cluster just to check if it's still healthy and working. You wouldn't do that, but beekeepers do. Awesome, thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thank you.


So, you know, it's fun to get in here, see new faces, see the energy around the building of God, just, you know, coming in here ready to work. So, you know, it's been exciting to get back in here and just be where we are.   But, you know, that was my mindset from as soon as I stepped foot on the field for the first time down in New Orleans, was just obviously taking it wrong with it. Coach said, you know, the first year, the second year's lead should be pretty good. They're expecting growth.  Are those factors that you're hoping or playing your favorite here as you take over?   Desmond, to kind of borrow your school metaphor with new classmates, I don't know if that makes you look like a new class president or whatever. How's life different when you are the guy here during the offices and workouts? Is it setting an example? Is it motivating? How's it different? Yeah, it's a setting example.  Yeah, they, when are we throwing, when are we doing this? And just letting them know, just taking leadership, taking the initiative of when to be, where to be. Obviously, you know, we're not going through much install right now. So, so kind of just pushing them and bringing everyone together, just, you know, right now we're just working on growing as, as culture as brothers and just trying to grow closer. Yeah, so, you know, you look at it and, you know, a lot of people say, okay, this is year two. I was not in this position. We were not even here this time last year. So, you know, a lot of us as rookies still look at this as, you know, we're still in a rookie year for the next two, three weeks, whatever it may have been. And, you know, this was a rookie offseason. So, you know, next offseason, you know, there are going to be things that you change and do better and, you know, go about differently. So, you know, I think it's just really just, you know, being in here and just being around the guys. Right before you, by being a backup, being behind markers and learning from him. And then once you, once they decide to make the change, make you to start, did you see a difference in response to fight from your teammates? Did you see a difference? No, I think, you know, throughout the entire season, myself and Marcus, you know, try to do the best job as we can of being leaders on the team obviously as a quarterback.   And the guys, you know, obviously being at the quarterback, they're going to gravitate to you. So, you know, Marcus did a great job. And, you know, I think I do a great job of being a leader. And so, you know, just going out there, as long as you're doing what you need to do in executing, I think everything's going to be okay.  So we've got to know each other real well.  So I will see what that game's like. And I know Logan's been talking up a big game too. So I'm excited to see what, you know, who's the best in the room. Logan claims he is right now. I wouldn't say I'm the best, but I wouldn't say I'm the worst either. You know, just just seeing, you know, he's had a completely different, you know, career and just the way he went about his game.  So, you know, it's going to be interesting to get, you know, once we get into, you know, with a really nitty gritty of it. Being a kind of your first rookie offseason number since you didn't really have that before. So how was it before years before being in the NFL? One more time.  So how was it different this offseason compared to your years just in college?  But, you know, in college, you get about two, maybe three weeks off, and then you're right back right when school starts.  You're in there. Then you got spring ball. And so, you know, obviously, in the NFL, you don't have any of that. You're on your own. And so just getting, for me, it was just being around the guys.   So it's all on your own, obviously. So, you know, you got to put in the work by yourself. You got to be self-motivated. And, you know, I think for obviously the first time, first offseason, I did pretty well. When you look back at the four games that they played, how much did you go back and rewatch some of that? What's with hindsight? What is the maybe one thing that you took from that? You're like, okay, I really picked up on that that I didn't have? Yeah, one thing I would just say is just obviously progression. You know, that's what you look for. Not only, you know, game to game, but year in year out is just progress.  And so, you know, we just, you go back and look at those four games and, you know, each game as myself, as a player, as an offense, I think we've got better. You know, it's obviously, you know, not where we want it to be at the end of the season. But, you know, I think that we see that, you know, where we can be and what we can do. So I'm excited for the progress that we showed and, you know, hopefully we continue to have that progress going, moving throughout. What, for you, when you look back at it, was the area of progression that you saw the most in your own game? Take the team part back like I showed you? Yeah, I would just say settling down, just being comfortable with where you're at. You know, not getting too antsy, just being able to go in and make plays and not have to make too many plays, you know, by yourself. There's 10 other guys out there that are going to help you. So just being able to go out there and just, you know, give what they're taking, or excuse me, take what they're giving you out there on the field. And I think, you know, once I settle down and saw that, that's kind of where we progress. Was there a moment in the off season where Arthur or Terry or some combination communicated to you that, yeah, we see you as the 2023 guy, too, and that's how we're progressing this off season. Did y'all have that conversation? Yeah, there was a conversation. I don't know what point, you know, in the off season. But, you know, I know those guys, trust me, are in Terry.  They see my leadership. And, you know, that that's what they want.  Did they work you into, like, did you know they're bringing Taylor in? I mean, did they say, all right, we're going to bring in a guy this is, but we don't want you to understand kind of the pecking order, the way we see it. Are you part of those conversations?  So I'm not up there sitting in those meetings.   Like we said, you know, they said that they trusted in me, said that they saw potential in what I could be. And, you know, that's all I needed to hear. For some, for, I guess, months, it seemed like there were questions about whether they would try to trade for quarterback, no more jacks. It was the nameless threat. Like, do you avoid that? Like, do people start asking you a lot about that when you're kind of sitting there being like, I think I'm the guy, but there's also all this outside talk. How do you deal with that?  But no, I can control what I can control. You know, one of those things that that's just obviously something that I can't control. Like I said, I'm not in those meetings. You know, are the Mr. Blank who's owner here. So I'm not the one making the calls.  And I just took it and went with it. What was your perspective on seeing all those signings having not just Taylor, but, you know, all the additions, the veteran additions that were brought to this team? Oh, I think, you know, it's a great addition to our team. You know, like I said before, progress. We always want to keep going up. And I think, you know, that, you know, the guys that we added on this team throughout free agency, I think it's really going to benefit us, not only on the field, but off the field, in the locker room, just leadership roles too. Just going out there to be able to, you know, push some of these younger guys to lead some of these younger guys, maybe not rookies, but you know, some of the guys maybe still on the rookie contract, whatever, to just go out there and be great. You know, some of these guys have came from successful teams, has been successful as individuals themselves. So it's going to be huge for not only myself, obviously, but all of us. How different is the vibe now than when you came in last year? I know you're more comfortable just like around the team, all those people coming in, how the vibe maybe is different? Oh, I would say for myself, you know, I think it's a completely different vibe. Obviously, like I said, 365 days ago, I was back in Louisville, getting ready for a draft, so I wasn't here then. But you know, it's a good vibe. You know, everyone's excited to be back here ready to work. Everyone's, you know, just happy to be here. Just, you know, there's obviously no complaints. Everyone was ready to get back and just ready to go to work. Being with a team, compared to this time last year when you had the draft, I mean, just like mentally, how does that feel different? Oh, I mean, it feels great.  We didn't have very many college, excuse me, professional teams, obviously close in the area. So as a younger kid, you know, I would watch the draft for maybe like the first, you know, 10 picks, whatever it may be. And then, you know, it kind of really didn't mean much more to me other than I wanted to be there one day.  What team am I going? What city is it going to be? And then now it's like, okay, who's going to help us? Like, and so it's pretty cool to, you know, kind of be in that spot. Now it's seeing, okay, and these are the pieces of the puzzle. Here's what they're thinking upstairs, like, and how it's going to help. So it's pretty cool. How did it feel like with when you have got the news that Chris and Caleb were being brought back, like, say, hey, these are the guys that we want to see around for the foreseeable future? Yeah, this smile on my face right here. No, those are two great guys, and they work their butts off every single day.  You know, they obviously all got to work as one, so I know they gel really well.   Is there some, something that can help that, or not help that, but rather like, can that be a help, you think, for you guys versus, you know, sometimes teams have the quarterback, it's 35. I mean, yeah, I think it can. I think it all depends on, you know, how the leader goes about it and, you know, how other people respond to it. But, you know, I don't think age really matters.  That's kind of where you get in trouble. But, you know, as long as everyone's on the same page, as long as everyone's trying to, you know, achieve a goal, I think it's all going to go pretty well. Some of these rumors that were happening in the off-season, some of the speculation that was happening by media, you know, I think media outside of this room, more like national media, the implication of that kind of was that, you know, there wasn't a quarterback for the Falcons or at least one that they would expect to be, you know, challenging for the division. Do you hear that at all, that message in the media and like, does that put a chip on your shoulder at all coming into this year? Yeah, I have a TV in my house. So I do see that sometimes. Yeah, you know, it puts a chip on my shoulder. But, you know, at the end of the day, like I said, I can control what I can control. I know at the end of the day, I'm going to go out here and work and go out here and be the best player I can be, not only for myself, but for my team as well. I actually did see that news as well. I've been to one hockey game. I think it was a Rangers versus the Devils up there in New York. And so I've been up there. I've been to one hockey game. No, but I think it would obviously be huge. You know, we have the Braves. We have the Hawks right now in the playoffs. Braves were obviously hot.  I think, you know, you saw the designs of what the area down there could be. It was beautiful and everything. So, you know, more attention. Why not? Yeah, I won't name all the guys just because, you know, there's guys here and there. But just know as a good group of guys, you know, we were down more so in the Brookhaven area, just working out, just building the connection.  It wasn't more so, you know, go out there and, you know, still work fundamentals and everything.  So that's something I took to heart. Like I said, when we had free agency coming left and right and guys, you know, I'm trying to figure out where guys are going to be. If I can get to them, if they can get to me, whether it's for a day or whether it's for a week, just being able to throw with all the different guys that came through. Couple more. What do you think the expectations for this team should be? Obviously, we want to go out there. We want to win the division, obviously, number one. And then number two, obviously, is go out there and win a Super Bowl. I mean, that's what every team is out here preparing to do, you know, coming through OTAs and camp and everything. But we want to go out there and we just want to get better. Like I said before, we want to progress. And everything that we do, whether it's mentally, physically, as a team, emotionally, we want to progress. We never want to be complacent and stay where we're at. We obviously never want to go backwards. As you mentioned, like with the draft, it's kind of cool to be on this side and say, hey, I wonder who can come in and help us the most. Do you follow in at all? Do you find yourself thinking I have to throw the ball? Hand the ball to that guy or face that guy, you know, across the line of practice? Do you pay attention? Do you think about those things? I mean, yeah.  So you take it with a grain of salt and kind of just, you know, give a quick glance and a picture about it and then kind of move on to the next thing. But no, obviously it is interesting to see, you know, what's out there and who people think and what everyone thinks and what people think we should do and this and that. So it'll be fun come draft night. Yeah, talk to you since you got the deal.  Just incredibly grateful. Super appreciative of it and that was the biggest takeaway.  So I'm ready to go but again, super grateful, thankful. I mean, it's life changing for my whole family. So incredibly grateful to the staff and Mr. Blank. And getting back in here, yesterday in the off-season program, what has that been like and what are some of the early goals and objectives as you move into this off-season? Yeah, the longer I've been here, the quicker the turnaround feels but it was fun. You get to like the middle of March and you just want to kind of get back. You kind of feel lost.  So it's really fun and this phase one is to really, or at least my mindset towards it is to, you know, focus on individual development, strength and conditioning, and then better understanding of the playbook as this OTA goes and really kind of work the mental and small technical details during this time. So really another huge aspect of it too is to grow relationships with your teammate. So especially new guys in the room, guys on the team and just continue to work that. Thank you. Chris, when you talk about being one of the highest paid officers in the league, like, I want to take you back to like when you first came in as a rookie, did you see yourself being here or was that a goal of yours to be good enough to be able to be paid in that manner?   You know, you get that, play your career and my dream has always been to be in the NFL.  So it was like, you know, combine was getting the best shape I can to run and then you go to the next phase of it.  And so really what I always try to focus on was make sure that the guys in the room, really offensive line room first and then, you know, the team overall knew that I was being the most prepared I could be and giving it my best effort every single day that I stepped foot in here. And so I don't think really anything else like that changes, but just know the kind of the same thing applies. How did you feel when you found out Katelyn McGarry was going to be around for a few more years? You know, that's my guy. I'm incredibly grateful and lucky really that to play next to a guy for four years, and then, you know, for both of us to be able to be re-signed is huge. You know, we have a great off the field relationship, but our on the field, you know, professional relationship is huge too because you work with the same person every day. You have a feel for communication for one another, you know, each other's strengths and weaknesses. And I feel like we really have that. And so just really lucky to be able to continue to work that. But I felt like the draft all over again where I was fortunate enough to get signed. And then I'm just kind of waiting for my guy wanted the best thing for him. And so when he came back, I was really, really excited. What do you got? Who got the active boot burst when we all got the contract? I just gave him, well, he texted me.  I didn't really want to bother him, but I was just checking in on him as a friend. And then I was super excited for him. Gave him a call the next day, let him celebrate with his family. Desmond is going to be the starter. How does that maybe change what this off season looks like for you guys in terms of prep versus maybe the unknown? Or not having a guy that you weren't familiar with?  And then now he's super excited for the opportunity that he has. But his communication, leadership and like command and the huddle as an offensive lineman is something that we know that he brings every day. And so just kind of what I said earlier, the great part about these OTA is really to be able to develop that relationship. And really even the small things of his tone of voice and timing up his tone of voice and like how he's going to do different things is really important as an offensive lineman. So it's going to be really fun to work on those small things. When you look back at the four game stretch that he was a starter last year, what was your biggest impression he made in those games that gave you guys confidence that he can't be the guy going forward? Yeah, I mean he had four games and four opportunities where those were really competitive games.  And especially in New Orleans, that's a really tough environment. And like I said, the command and presence he had in the huddle, it was awesome. And his ability to communicate, and that's all you can really ask for is an offensive lineman, is if he's communicating what he wants or what he thinks and what he sees to us, then it's our job to go out and execute. And he does a great job. He's a great teammate, great guy, you guys know that. So just, you know, continue to work those small things, those OTAs. Chris, last year the offensive line in the unit really kind of elevated from two years ago and helped establish the identity of the team really. What is the kind of objective for the unit overall going into next year? Where do you feel like you can build upon from last year? We just, you know, we got to keep getting better. You know, obviously we don't have the quarterback in hit. And so that starts at a fundamental standpoint of, you know, starting with myself and everybody improving that, you know, individual techniques, small things about it. And then to the schematic points of now, it's all, you know, at least the guys up front, you know, it's a lot of us. It's our third year in the system. So we should all really have a great understanding and we definitely do of what the coaching staff is asking of us. And then being able to problem solve in the game or in situations where things come up and be able to know and get ourselves in the right position. And that's definitely the case. We're super lucky that everybody in our room really knows the standard of how we want to go about every day. It's super fun. I mean, we have really, really awesome culture on our whole team, but in our O-line room it's really special. And so it's guys who really love playing football come out, work as hard as they can every day, and then play physical. So it's so much fun and I'm really appreciative to be a part of it because it makes the season fun. Is there a bit of a different dynamic this year because there's more continuity on the offensive line going into next season? Because I remember on the first day of training camp, I think Arthur said that three of the five spots on the line were up the grabs for, you know, open competition. And it seems like now some of those positions are a lot more settled this year. Does that change anything for you guys as a group going in as you work to prepare for next season? I mean, Coach Smith always talks about competition drives everything.  And so we're just going out working every day. And but to just settle on what we did, it wasn't good enough. You know, we didn't make the playoffs and we have obviously higher aspirations. So just to continue to work like that every day.  There's combination blocks we can improve. We can tighten stuff up. There's things that, you know, improve individually, but then tying in with each other in a, you know, Alex Mackinac told me it's really, really boring being good at offensive line play because it's like the same things over and over and over again. And so like it's kind of repetitive, but like, but that's like how you become better. So just working that small things like just your hands the same combination block. We have literally thousands of reps banked with each other, but hopefully banked thousands more to keep improving. Is it boring to you? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Just checking. Yeah, no, no. There's a lot of speculation that this office is outside of the building about the Falcons quarterback situation. Is it going to be dead? How much attention do you pay to that? Do you keep an ear out? Do you kind of nod?  I definitely ignore it completely.  So that's really all I'm consumed about. And it's like kind of funny because I'll have family. Like my immediate family knows like not to send me things. I don't know anything, but like you have like extended family will send you something. I'm like, yeah, it's great. I got it out for shifter too. So it's just like, like, you know, you don't really, you know, pay attention to that stuff. You know, you go in more of a friend role where you're just like really thankful if a guy leaves for your time together. But then also you're happy for them for their opportunities.  So you just you're really thankful. And, you know, you're more of a friend there than really like looking into anything.  What's your perspective on that? Is that kind of like, OK, that's going to help us kind of continue to build this culture? What did you kind of think of some of those things? There's guys you respect and admire, you know, played David for four years. And he's one of the best defensive tackles in the NFL, in my opinion.    So it's really cool when you like respect and admire guys and then you see the way they play. And you know that just from watching and then have those guys in the building is really cool. Your head spinning the first one. You have no idea what's going on here in a new city.  You know how the process works and you can kind of just focus on anything like it slows. It definitely definitely slows down where you're trying to learn everybody's name in the building where now it's like you kind of know everybody. You're not worried about that. So just things kind of slow down, I guess. Chris, being the first guard to get a hundred million dollar deal. What does that mean to you, especially knowing what it's going to mean for your peers moving forward? Just super, super, super thankful. And I'm thankful for the guys who came before me. There's so many guys who set the standard to build upon. And so I really hope that, you know, guys for pass it and guys, you know, continue to grow. And it's good for the position, which is good for everybody. So I'm super thankful. There's so many great players that came before me. And you just build and build and build off that foundation. So I hope I get to be that someday for somebody else. But it doesn't feel real most of the time, honestly. But just, again, super thankful. And I know the long term impacts that it has. So thankful really to the staff and to Mr. Blank. So is it fair to say that you see yourself as a leader then for this offensive line? That you see yourself as that guy? I don't know. It's like, you know, year four, I love the guys, love Jake. I mean, Jake's obviously the guy in our room. But I just try in the way I kind of look at his like, and, you know, Jake's my friend and really admire the way he does it. But he just came in every day, quiet, working on his thing. And like the way he goes as a professional is the way he leads. So that's kind of, I guess, this is the way I'll try and do it. I'm not very vocal, but in the same sense, like I just try and be the best professional I can be every day. And then, you know, guys take whatever they want from it. But I'm super excited. And then just in a support sense, I'm always there to support guys whenever they need anything. Chris, when we talk about Arthur Smith has been a former offensive line. How do you feel like he's benefited you, if at all?  He definitely understands the position. He understands the challenges that certain plays put us in. You know, every play in the NFL, somebody's got a harder job than somebody else. And coach understands that. He always trying to put us in, you know, as good a position as we possibly can. And so even if something bad happens or he kind of sees that during the league, he'll make an adjustment to always kind of protect us. And he tells us, too, we always try to put us first or look through our mindset, which as a player, you're super thankful for. And we have an unbelievable staff, really thankful. And I think you guys around the building every day know, like, there's true belief in everything that we do here from players to coaches. So it's, again, really thankful and love it. Chris, when did you change since the contract?   So I just, I vested everything. So I bought a, I did buy a tractor about John Deere tractor for my house and in the off season of plow. So I'm kind of excited about that. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, so like I would drive by a dealership in the off season all the time.  She's like, yeah, okay, okay. Then I finally got the tractor. Can I, can I finally go? And she's like, yes, we'll go look and like stop it and looked and they were, they were super helpful. So I got it. Gonna plow this off season. That's like my fun thing to do is mow the lawn and plow. So it's like very, very simple.


Everybody, it's Eric Johnson from Arte Throse Nation. In today's video, we're going to go behind the scenes, another three day training camp, and we're going to look at kind of some key tweaks, start to finish. Devon Martin, he had come in and we were looking at a few things. When we did day one, like you said, we've talked about before with the throwing chain reaction, we're going to plug every athlete in. We're going to evaluate and go through their progression. So first thing that we taught him, he was too far forward in his throw, which is going to make the reverse and the efficiency of the finish compromise. Second thing we look at is how we move into that. We're adjusting things like the rewrap. And then when we went to the full throw, we're looking at the sweep action and how he's setting up his chain reaction. So the key thing here was that he tended to be too far forward, the rewrap was lacking somewhat and he would shift. And so we were trying to show him how that timing would work and how that would change. And that was a really key thing. And this was a good example with that rewrap. He's too active with the upper body and that had to tie into his sweep leg issue. And that was something that we figured out all these things in day one. So then as we plug him through his six pillars in day two, we would start to apply the fixes and the changes. That was a lot better. Not bad. As we start day two, we're immediately going to be focusing on how he's going to be loading the delivery leg and being able to rotate and move into the finish much more effectively. We're going to slow things down. We're going to be more mechanical. We're teaching them how to stay longer and connect to the shot. You can see he's still kind of going a little too far forward and coming over the board. So we did some preloaded throws. So this is where we're going to have the knees and hips preloaded into the direction of the finish. And what we're going to do is show him how to move the hip in time to get the lower body just that little bit ahead, feel the block and apply so that he's extending to the board without coming out. But you're going to see in this video, he kept coming out. So then the next thing we're going to do is obviously we're going to be putting those things together, moving into the middle of the ring and stepping in. We like to do step-ins. It's a very deliberate movement. It's kind of like a choppier South African in the sense that we're going to really walk and emphasize how to get the hip ahead. At this point here, we're able to start looking at how he's activating the shoulder and the sweep and how that's leading to him turning the upper body too quickly ahead. And that's why you're going to kind of notice that his hips are going to kind of break shift. And that's what's causing a lot of that shift to go forward. So this was a big movement today. That looks pretty good. Day three, we're going to try to say we've got a ton to work on. He's got to go home. What's the game plan? And we're going to put some final touches on the things that we address on day two and the mechanical day. And then we make it super rhythmical. We want to focus on the rhythm, put it together, make it fluid so that he can feel the difference. Think about less and apply. And that's the big difference here is that on day two, we're really being mechanical day three. Again, we're really trying to include that more smooth, fluid motion. And so you're going to see he's starting to move. You're going to see that upper body kind of rolling. Again, that has to do partially with his sweep and a combination of how he's holding the left arm. So let's take a look at how it went over the course of three days. You're going to, again, notice these subtle little changes. You're going to notice that when he starts, he's going to be creating a little bit different position. And in the mechanical day and the rhythmical day, because we were addressing the issues, we're seeing a lot more closer similarities. So as we break down the six pillars, you're going to see these slight little shifts. As he comes from here, now he's starting to attack his sprint. So here you're going to notice the subtlety of the block leg. It's a little closer. It's getting down a little faster and just allowing him to stay back and kind of square up and get into the throw a little bit better. And again, you notice the difference, especially between day one and day three, there was good differences, but he did a very nice job of applying changes in the second day mechanically and trying to put him together on the third day. And truth be told, he was smoked. We had done several hours of training each day and he was dead and he did a great job on that final thing. So if you guys would like to know more about how we kind of take a throw, break it down, find the issues, figure out the formula that works best for you using the throwing chain reaction system, be sure to click the link in the bio or in the description and we will see you on the next video.


Oh, that question. One thing it could look like is modularizing education in a way that we don't necessarily just focus everything around the three-credits or the six-credits course or the five-credits course or what have you. That education may change radically. I hope would be that we could actually see a higher education landscape where well-being is at the center of everything we do. I hope it looks like professors working together to write textbooks that meet their individual teaching styles, that meet the learner's individual demands and that are free. I would like to see that inclusion of different learning styles, different sources of learning as opposed to just one source will continue in the future. When students come to places like UBC there will be a recognition that learning outside of the classroom can be just as valuable as the learning that goes on inside the classroom. So students will be encouraged to take more control over what their university experiences are going to look like. You know, can we scale up from the apprentice model where you work with someone, an expert very closely and you become an expert by doing the things that experts do? Can we kind of try to scale that up in some way so that we can reach the hundreds of students in some of our large classes? I think that's the big challenge.


All right guys, what is going on and welcome back to another video?  I was gonna wake up fresh-faced and Crack into some football reactions Well, unfortunately, I've literally been bedridden for two days Finally got out this morning. I've been smashing the cold and flu tablets. They seem to have done something And so here we are I had no choice but to turn the camera on right now and start talking doesn't matter if my voice sounds like shit Honestly, just need this this just needs to be done. This just needs to be done So this is gonna be an intro clip. This is gonna introduce my next series of videos my Well, I guess my my my body of work over the next I'd say a couple of weeks and That is to get through the top 100 players of 2020 I do realize we're two weeks into the season It's a weird season. It's a weird year overall, isn't it for for professional sports for all sports I'm lucky being in New Zealand. Let New Zealand has you know, we're not through it yet We're certainly still in the midst of it, but as far as As far as our level of lockdown our level of restriction, it's been You know minimal which has been fantastic.  So this is an intro clip. Okay over the next I Would say three videos we're gonna focus on three players my three favorite players coming into this season and all three have had You know various I guess various things happen to them over these first couple of weeks of the season So it's going to be interesting following that we're going to get into this top 100 series But the three players we're going to focus on first today Leonard Fournette Saekwon Barclay and my pick for the offensive rookie of the year Jonathan Taylor. So those three players are who you're going to see on this channel next I'm not going to say too much more. I do want to do it on camera with you guys So I'm gonna call it quits here. I'm gonna Oh my god.  I'm probably at about 80 percent. I'm probably at about 80 percent We've gone from a hundred down to about 50 and I'm back up to 80 and this is the point where these reactions start So guys, thank you so much for being here.  So guys Sit back relax and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out