Before we get into the video, people, I am giving away 11,500 Apex coins every single month to be with a chance to win them, make sure you are subbed to this channel and have that bell notification button ticked. Drop a like on this video and leave a comment down below. More details are in that video description. What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today I bring you another Apex Legends video and today I want to discuss the Wingman and give you guys my opinion on this beast. Discuss the point I am seeing, so many people bring up on social media about this thing being overpowered. Is the Wingman overpowered? Today I give you my opinion, but before we go any further guys, if you do enjoy the video and would like to show your support you can by hitting that like button. If you are new around here and enjoy these daily Apex Legends videos, be sure to subscribe. Okay, so the Wingman, the monster, the beast, the hand cannon of Apex Legends which has been the vocal point for many in regards to weapon balance in the game.  And in all reality people, the Apex community is completely split over this weapon. I pull out a poll on Twitter the other day asking whether this thing should be nerfed and the replies were amazing. People saying it should be, people saying leave it alone, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well here is where I stand on the Wingman. So I've used this from the start, played many of games with it. I got a few decent kills too including a few squad wipes here and there, but for me the weapon feels so inconsistent compared to others. Now sometimes it seems I can't miss a shot. Other times I couldn't hit a fat dude from a few feet away and it's been like this on a consistent basis since I've started playing the game. It's like it suffers from major bullet bloom. Something we have seen in Destiny games of the past. So although it seems like you are landing shots they don't seem to register and to be honest for a weapon that is as powerful as the Wingman which is very powerful by the way. This bullet bloom it seems to have could be a way of keeping it from being stupidly broke by respawn. I mean I know I'm the only one who seems like they're landing shots with a wingman but it just seems like bullets have gone through people. It seems to have little to none emissive whatsoever and like I said that bullet bloom seems out of this world. Now I'm talking from a perspective on console yeah and I've seen it on PC and people don't miss with it but I'm talking from a console players perspective. So how powerful and how fast can the wingman kill? So on screen now we can see a few of these weapons stats. So we can see on the far left it does 45 body shot damage, headshot damage it does 90, bracket stat is with the school piercer attachment. We also see time to kill with and without the school piercer attachments against every type of helmet from common to legendary. Bracket score yeah is obviously with the school piercer attachment equipped. So here we can see just how powerful this weapon can be. Even when you come across an enemy with an epic or legendary helmet you can still kill them in 0.65 seconds taking only three headshots and don't forget epic and legendary helmets take away 25% of the headshot damage. The wingman still though does 84 damage to the cranium if you have that school piercer attachment on it allowing it to almost reshot any target to the face. But guys even without the school piercer you can still three tap enemies no matter the helmet they have on as long as all shots hit their head again capable of killing an enemy in 0.65 seconds with the best helmet you can have on. Even crazier when you think about it is this thing's range too. The range is just absolutely nuts with that two times sight I'm seeing everybody love with this it does indeed work incredible and that's why it's a fan favourite and it just allows you to make those longer shots much much easier. But people I will say it again I'm paper yes it's amazing and although it's truly capable of killing this quick for me it is an inconsistent weapon which has a lot of bloom and just has not much aim assist whatsoever but it feels like it don't anyway. In the right hands unconsoled and on PC the weapon is on another level that is for sure but to the standard player it doesn't have that same effect yes it's incredible yes it kills super fast yes it's a hand cannon which in my opinion takes a lot of skill to use but even so it still can be very inconsistent to even the best of players. I've said this numerous times I don't feel a nerf is needed on this weapon I could point you in the direction of many weapons I've used at the right time from the right distances can kill this quick the wingman is supposed to be a weapon to use at close to medium ranges it should be able to kill relatively quickly when you consider the weapons you will come up against at close to mid range things like the peacekeeper that can basically one shot yet so in my opinion if you have the skill to kill somebody at close range who has a peacekeeper because you can land through headshots then fair play to you being super accurate while under fire at close range while using the hand cannon where you have to pick your shots it's pretty hard in my opinion that it's something only the best of players can achieve and I've seen it many many times before when a weapon becomes popular and more and more people start using it we see many people calling for a nerf this is not the answer at all the answer is to make other weapons be able to compete while doing something that doesn't need ruining when you can make other things feel better and make people feel better while using them that's the answer the impression respawn will give going forward is super important for the apex of legends community we need to see the devs are listening to everybody not just to people complaining the ones calling for a nerf because when nerfing weapons in reality when they ain't even that bad is not the answer and this is coming from a destiny player and you guys will know if you've ever played a destiny game when people start complaining about a certain weapon won't you always seemed until recently to almost fortnight style and vault the weapon that nerf it that bad I could literally sit here all day naming weapons that this has happened to and it seriously affected the game in the long run for sure but only saw sense and stopped nerfing weapons into the ground but instead so I bought in everything else and that is the answer with the wingman yes it's a very powerful weapon in the right hands but I'd say 85% of weapons in the game are the same in the right hands so yeah don't make a feel good weapon feel bad because people are complaining about it make the feel bad weapons feel good so everybody is happy and to be honest people I'd take the car barn over the wingman speedfire too because when I come up against someone using the wingman to me it feels like most of the time it's a fair battle and even if I come out of the battle down tonight I instantly say and think fair play dude has nasty accuracy with that wingman because my accuracy isn't bad so if I'm landing pure headshots and chest awkward shots and I still die first to someone using a wingman that's nobody's fault but my own so if you are good with a wingman fair play to you the weapon don't work for me consistently like it seems too far a lot of players out there but even if you ask them I guarantee you guys they'd still say they are seen bullet bloom they're still missing shots that should be hitting and sometimes the weapon will not work for them and they will lose a gunfight the wingman in my opinion is a weapon that requires a certain level of skill too perfect and that's basically how I feel about it now if a nerf was to come I truly hope that nerf would do nothing to the weapon in terms of damage, bloom, aim assist, mag size or even making it a rare weapon to find the only nerf I can honestly say I wouldn't have an issue with is its damage fall off because at the moment it's nonexistent it does have absolute crazy range which I'm fine with as long as it isn't doing the same damage within 10 foot as is in within 50 foot I know it drops off a little but it doesn't drop off enough in my opinion and when you can outgun a sniper at a certain range fire quicker as well I browse will raise but other than that please respond to leave the weapon be and this is the opinion of somebody who doesn't even enjoy using it that much so yeah guys that is my opinion on the wingman you tell me what you think about this weapon down below in that comment section do you think it needs a nerf you think we spawn should leave it alone tell me why but on that note guys we have come to the end of the video if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like would have helped out if you are new around here enjoy those daily apex legend videos like guides top 5 news views community highlights just about everything make sure you subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully I will see you on that next one


Let us pray, almighty and eternal God, Lord of the universe. We invoke your blessing on us as we bring the body of our brother departed to this honored place where the people of our nation are represented at the center of government. In honoring our faithful servant, we are reminded that when he was known in this life, he was an influence on his family, his friends, his comrades and arms. But now that he is known only to your grace, he will be forever an influence on all people throughout our native land. By his presence here, oh Lord, he is a representative for all and of the fundamental truths taught by your word and reflected we pray in the statutes of our land. By our presence here, oh Lord, we affirm that every life is sacred and precious and that there are noble principles which are preserved only by those willing to make the supreme sacrifice. So bless us in our mourning, oh God, that we might increase in spiritual stature, strengthen our resolve to do what is right, and reaffirm our belief in the sacred cause of freedom's right. Amen. Hear the word of God as it is recorded in Psalm 90. Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest, return ye children of man. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thou carryest them away as with a flood. They are as a sleep. In the morning they are like grass which grows up. In the morning it flourishes and grows up. In the evening it is cut down and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath. We spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are three-square years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four-square years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow. For it is soon cut off and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger, even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long, and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servant, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us. Yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. Amen. An American hero has returned home. God bless him. We may not know of this man's life, but we know of his character. We may not know his name, but we know his courage. He is the heart, the spirit, and the soul of America. Today a grateful nation mourns the death of an unknown serviceman of the Vietnam conflict. This young American understood that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. He may not have wanted to be a hero, but there was a need in the Iron Triangle off Yankee Station at Quezon over the Red River Valley. He accepted his mission and did his duty, and his honest patriotism overwhelms us. We understand the meaning of his sacrifice and those of his comrades yet to return. This American hero may not need us, but surely we need him. In Longfellow's words, So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken, The light he leaves behind him Lies upon the paths of men. We must not be blind to the light that he left behind. Our path must be worthy of his trust. We must not betray his love of country. It's up to us to protect the proud heritage now in our hands And to live in peace as bravely as he died in war. On this day, as we honor our unknown serviceman, We pray to Almighty God for his mercy. And we pray for the wisdom that this hero be America's last unknown. Let us pray, Almighty and Eternal God, We are grateful for thy gift of life and hope. Today we have witnessed an historic and sacred moment in the life of our nation. Words, ceremonies cannot adequately express our gratitude For the gallantry and heroism of a son of our nation known only to thee. The thoughts that emanate from our hearts reaffirm our commitment To the ideals of freedom and the quest for peace Except with loving kindness and grace the soul of this great American. May his selfless devotion and self-sacrifice be an inspiration to all Americans. And thus, dear Lord, through his deeds we reaffirm our love for thee And our loyalty to our country. As we mourn him, we his family are strengthened by the resolve That this nation shall always be the land of the free And the home of the brave. Amen.


Let's get started. We have Eli here. He will talk about, you know, from shore to ship, you know, really exciting topic here It's not about connected cars. It's about connected ships. So take it away. Thank you Okay, it's the switch that says on All right, can you guys hear me now? Okay, there we go So thank you guys for joining This has been a really interesting journey for like the last year of my life, so I'm Eli Senevoi I'm from Ernst & Young. You probably don't associate Ernst & Young with, you know, this type of technology or technology at all It's something that we're working on and I'm personally Responsible for building so I lead our microservices practice Where we essentially help any company out there There's people that are obviously ahead of the curve in terms of looking at their monoliths and, you know Breaking them apart into microservices and there are some that are laggards and we really try to help across the line by bringing You know, our architects, our developers to speed up the process coach your developers, your architects, your IT organization on what it takes to run microservices in production and From there on we, you know, are there for advice, etc. as we take this on so I'm actually presenting here on behalf of Royal Caribbean They wanted to be here to co-present this with us, but unfortunately we cannot control the weather and Hurricane Irma was last weekend and they've been stuck in some DR activities, but You know, there's a silver lining because it's a really great use case to talk about in terms of What that has meant to us from the ability to do DR with microservices in production I can actually tell you talk you guys through a real live example of how that worked out for us So let me get started here So today when you go on a Royal Caribbean ship and you're trying to Sail anywhere, right? As a guest You get those two pieces of paper on the screen there, right? It tells you everything that's going on on the ship today Like what type of activities are happening where to go what restaurants are out there? What menus they're serving, you know, what shore excursions are going on which ports of call you're visiting What's available on the shore once you get off the ship things like that, right? This two pieces of paper get printed out every day and get placed in every guest's room And it today costs about a million dollars Per ship per year to print out So you can imagine that it's not the best way to do things especially in the digital age So there's not a real good app to go into In order to get the same information And I know about you guys I'm not carrying around a piece of paper with me when I'm on a cruise to figure out where to go But I do have my phone on me, right? and so This is probably my my dongle HDMI doing a little flicker action, but At the end of the day, you know The vision is to get this information on a phone and create a truly like great experience for a mobile app for for a cruise ship guest You know when you try to do an initiative like that You really want to start from scratch, but unfortunately like you know for big enterprises You know a lot of the data is locked down by big mean main frames and as for hundreds and all kinds of Legacy systems, that's really hard to get the data out of and I'm going to talk you through some of the specific complications that that We had to deal with but at the end of the day We thought that this was a really great example of Truly releasing distributed systems because we had to put an Application out there that worked on ships and on shore so across a Fleet of 40 ships. We had to have the same mobile application running that is running You know today in production if you are on the shore Over satellite connectivity right in the same way that you're not looking at your mobile app and saying oh this sucks This won't load. I don't have connection. I don't have this right So that was really the challenge that we were looking to solve So I spoke a little bit about myself. These are the other guys that were supposed to be here with me Laura Mao leads the software engineering team at Royal Caribbean and then Roberto Alamon is one of our microservices developers that we've been working with been essentially a team of Initially six developers on shore with about four off and since that beginning we've actually grown to from overall from a project perspective from about 20 people on this project when it was just in the architecture phase to about 200 plus now across different aspect of this app, so it's very rapidly growing It's getting not just into the mobile side of things, but also into ML and cognitive evaluation of some of the data you can collect from a cruise ship as well as Getting into web and and other areas too. So it's it's been very very much Over-encompassing and the early successes obviously pave more of the road for Investing more and more into this so we can accomplish a lot of great things So Classically as a consultant I had to get this deck approved by our audit department so that I You know don't say anything that I can't say and things like that And so I have to put like the consulting framework the you know complication Action all resulting from some sort of a situation Otherwise don't let me show it to you guys so This is what we're gonna be talking about today, but I want to spend too much time on this So let's jump straight into it so the goal for the business was to release like a state-of-the-art mobile app, right? and this app was supposed to be able to work Ship and shore no matter where you go same type of experience right so in a sense when You're opening your mobile app anywhere, and it's really hard to find like some of the enablers that you know you have companies like pub nub and You know elastic beanstalk and some of these past solutions that lets you do a lot of these things really easily In order to operate the same ship the same thing over a hybrid architecture on both 40 ships and on shore in a way that doesn't require you to You know create different code bases and run in a really simple way We really thought that you know microservices and Docker and DCOS was kind of our answer, so I'm gonna talk you through a little bit How we got there and why we chose those things and what the drivers were but the situation we were in is essentially You know a lot of really complex solutions have evolved on top of an ace 400 solution, right a Cruise line is really dependent on their reservation system, right? So anything it's like the it's like an ERP essentially for that type of operation So any reservation that comes in any type of accounting any type of like B2B with travel agents or other Partners that direct people to the cruise line reservations. They all integrate into this one system. The system is very old I'm sure you all have cases like that if you're in companies that have been around Over, you know 10 20 years that you have that, you know one seat system that holds all the secrets, right? That you you have these grandiose plans of like one day We'll get rid of these things and you know replatform to something that gives us some more flexibility But for now we basically have to Come up with ways to get data out of it and for for us. It's this reservation system So it's as for a hundred base it has some proprietary You know version of DB2 behind it It's got an RPG service layer, which I'm 29 RPGs a little bit before even my time Never even heard of it until these guys told me about it So on top of that there's like a web sphere layer and another service layer and another service layer It's a mess, right? So how do we start untangling some of this stuff, right? When you talk to some some of the guys out here, you know the Kafka guys like Kauffman and Data stacks guys they'll essentially tell you that you know when you ingest all this information up You can essentially start recreating a lot of the systems a lot of the data that you have essentially in a cached layer above all the complexity and Begin using it as as you please from there on and and that's something that we were trying to do and unlocking that issue there wasn't a lot of You know source of truth for content management and authoring so in our situation We chose a system in Adobe experience manager But essentially a tool for people to take master data and then for the the mobile app decorated with guest-facing content, right? So you don't want to see you know ship gross gross tonnage of like this many tons and you know this other master data detail you wanted Told in a more illustrative way right like welcome to allure of the seas You know this ship is beautiful and largest in the world yada yada yada And you need a place to write all that copy and get it approved So getting one place to do all that targeted our product managers and our cruise directors was a part of this as well In terms of scalability and modernization there was no existing service layer that could actually take on The traffic that a mobile device could potentially Mean right so today When you're on a cruise ship and you want to go on a shore excursion or you want to buy a wine package or an internet package You have to actually go to the guest services desk stand in line Move a little bit more in line move a little more in line and then talk to a person that You know will try to accommodate you and you know you sign up on a sheet's first come first serve You know there's capacity. There's inventory for these things You know it from a millennial perspective like I'm not gonna do that It's it's a little bit of a ridiculous expectation if I can't do it from my phone It's probably not gonna happen and so Also the potential of all the lost revenue that could come from people just able to book this stuff on their phone as Opposed to people that get frustrated from waiting in line or not knowing that there is a line to go to Right or just not knowing about a specific event or a feature of or activity that's offered on the ship You know that was kind of the thinking behind that and then From the perspective of what we wanted to build You know today if they wanted to make any change It's a monolith right so Everybody kind of has to put their kid gloves on and you know talk to the base database team and and ask them like okay We want to use this table. We have to change this one aspect like whoa, whoa, whoa Like we're changing one value like just simple update to a row in a database, but kid gloves have to be on everybody's prepared it's like You know the analogy I use for it is we have these go-no-go sessions right where you make a decision It's like electing a pope, so I call it the white smoke sessions At the end of the session you have some white smoke released and we finally decide okay We've updated a row in a database and good guy could that have been a whole lot easier if You know there was something that allowed us to update it without cascading issues across everything else right so The microservices aspect helps us with that because we can actually divide things up and If I forget to talk about this remind me, but I actually can give you a Situation that proves out the value of microservices over this hurricane Which is essentially how we had a situation where we had unexpected logic happen in our app because all of a sudden a voyage had to be extended by four days and We had to go to a port that wasn't even a port that was in our database Because you know we're trying to stay away from you know people going into a hurricane and Had to essentially still reflect accurate information in the mobile app and we Did it really easily I could literally go screen by screen in the app field by field because of my ability to control each Service in a fine-grained way to go and change that and that is really really powerful I don't know from a business perspective if you've ever had you know if you were a developer or a product owner and Someone on the business side say hey we had to change this and they really don't understand the cascading effects of what that changed My mean in a monolith and you had to kind of say well, it's not that easy. It's you know require x y and z This gives you an ability to build a product where you're essentially Controlling how fine-grained you want your ability to be in the future to control some of these things So it's really great from that perspective And then we wanted to make it resilient and scalable, right? so You know today a Ship is maybe 99% connected all the time. There's satellite connection, but for example We cannot deploy a Cluster that has nodes both on the ship and on the shore, right? That's you're gonna lose that connectivity and that won't they'll just throw too many errors So that's not possible today because of you know extended periods of Disconnectivity sometimes, but it's not as big as people may think right satellite is actually pretty strong It's about a 300 megabit connection a good allocation of that goes towards the guest ability to use the the web But there's you know a qos layer allocated for ship applications And just quite a bit of it and the connectivity is usually good, but there are periods of blackouts Sometimes you're in China sometimes you're behind a mountain sometimes you're Bermuda triangle You don't know right so we do have to kind of plan for that scenario And then finally I'm not sure if you guys have ever gone through The process of educating an organization that's been really running in a traditional IT mode about how to do Devops what DevOps is what it means Honestly, I've done this several times and usually they think they you know just set up Jenkins and it just all starts going But you know Just to paint a scenario If I want to deploy a microservice today First of all, this is an explanation that I have to make all the time Usually people are just used to use DevOps for deploying code right, but when I'm deploying a microservice it includes Like in this situation there was legume code built on Java right then we have our Kafka connectors we have our Kafka topics that have to be created either manually or by script or by turning on configuration Then we have database schemas database tables and key spaces that have to be created for each table because we want to deploy Our services in an immutable way right so we don't want any shared database pattern and we want to Have a clean copy so that you know situations like actually you want to have today We had something funky happen To one of our services where the database table that's relying on is corrupted in some way And I can simply spin up another instance of it redirect my API management To that new instance take that on and down and let the DBA team loose on it to figure out what happened So that's something that that we need to make sure we could do but from a DevOps perspective Culturally has really been the toughest thing because I have to in order to make a tiny little change. I have to Talk to if it's if it's across the whole stack I have an infrastructure guy which is separate from the cloud team guy, which is separate from the DBA guy Which is separate from the middleware guys that actually manage DC OS and Kafka, right?  That's eight different teams And I don't know if you guys have been on Conference calls with like over 25 people trying to make consensus on something, but it's probably one of the worst things in the world So that's that's kind of day in and day out, right of the situation we came into So We thought like we need to create a different vision like we need to kind of let loose on it So our vision was to create kind of one digital hub one Footprint or reference architecture of what royal Caribbean's future architecture would run on so You know, there's obviously still kind of struggles with this But the idea is any new application any new service would be deployed Along with these micro service principles it would be deployed on DC OS It would use no sequel and Cassandra in some cases depending on which you know, we sometimes would use You know some sort of a relational database as well, but In most situations it would adhere to this Kind of footprint that I'm about to share with you in a few more slides, right? But everything that is to this date kind of that traditional integration type services, so Enterprise service buses any Type of that older, you know XML soap-based type of integration technology, etc We're gonna go away from that and leave it to The things that are simple don't change too often don't need to be a micro service, etc I don't have a slide for this here But there is a slide that I share with my clients that it's essentially a matrix that says are you a micro service? and it essentially splits it across The speed of change from a business perspective and the complexity of management, right? If it's complex to manage and it doesn't change too often You don't need to make it a micro service because it doesn't change too often. It's already set up and You're probably gonna just trade off for more complexity to manage that one thing that doesn't really need that level of complexity But if it's something that changes every few days a lot of requirements. You really need that fine-grained ability And it has some level of complexity to it then You know by all means you need the tools that microservices gives you in order to manage that But you also need to set up the kind of the Enablers around it to be able to manage that complexity as well. So things like you know circuit breakers and service catalogs and service discovery, you know ability to do green blue deployments and Canary deployments All those types of things are enablers to essentially manage microservices at scale that You need to have if you're gonna be building them, right? so that was kind of the goal there and then The next part of it was essentially Getting everybody on the same page right from an organization that was really living in the SOA world around ESBs and things like that just getting everybody on the page that okay Our ESB is no longer the main place where you're gonna use in ESB in places where we don't want to be in the business of building Integrations we don't want to build new connectors. We want to use easy simple connectors for things Because there is no competitive advantage in building it. There is no reason to it's already available in our ESB And it's simple that's when we can use that traditional integration technology But for everything else where it gives us a competitive advantage to build something new something that brings logic that No one can compete with us on right that essentially makes us better than our competitors That makes sense to for us to own that code for us to customize and maintain it locked you know in time forward so Obviously it isn't a smooth road so the next slide is complications So we tried to answer these three questions You know, how do we deliver with what we have today and what else do we need so? when I look at I actually came into the whole microservices native cloud world from doing a lot of IT strategy work and I used to do a lot of application maturity assessment and rationalization assessments which There are essentially a way to take your cmdb if you have one if not it's nice Excel spreadsheet exercise, but you take your application inventory and Gather a bunch of survey information from both business quality and technical quality of your application to help you determine One of four things is that application? Redundant not in the good way redundant as in it's duplicative and you need to essentially retire it or Do you need to either re-platform it enhance it or? Completely replace it right so one of those four things you can figure out through that So we essentially did a similar assessment here to say, you know we need these things for us to be able to run microservices and This is what we have here today, and these are the gaps, and we need to bring in some new technology in We also wanted to make sure that we have a standard ship shore footprint, so This is one of the key reasons we chose mesosphere But in general when we were doing our assessment we were choosing between Pivotal and OpenShift and DCOS in terms of how do we orchestrate containers and scale and When we were doing that assessment one of the key things that we were focused on as you know We cannot run a cloud on our ships. We have we're constrained on space We don't have the skill set, you know we have our IT on the ships our folks that are basically guys that you know our sys admin level and below that Are committing six month contracts to work IT on a ship right there we we're not sourcing You know the next brightest engineers and Google and Apple and you know all the places where some of that town Goes so we had to come up with something that was easy to to work But also allowed us to deploy to deploy the same code ship or show no matter what it is So we needed the same experience from The infrastructure layer up for everybody and DCOS Which we ended up with gave us that but the other solutions that as well right same interface one CLI or one UI to go into One way to essentially configure your services and deploy them whether you're on ship or on shore like to us We don't care what it's running on we can SSH into either one we can You know type in an IP and we get onto it and see the same thing whether we are on ship or on shore So that was really important and then the final thing is just keeping ship and shore and sink which It's probably the toughest mission. We still have a few patterns. We were perfecting but You know Kafka and solutions like that were really important for us on that front So what we were really trying to achieve is first of all that we have the same data ship and shore but then we had the additional complexity of Some systems exist on the shore and some systems only exist on the ship and some data falls into essentially the realm of It goes to the ship and never makes it off of it It goes on the ship gets manipulated on ship comes off the ship and then we have to analyze it It originates on the ship comes off or it originates and it doesn't get off the ship, right? So for each of those scenarios While that data is still live and isn't retired we had to think about You know if we're using in the mobile app It still needs to be on the shore and we have to give it the same Time to live as what it would have on the ship originally and vice versa with the shore data And how do we arrange all that so it's not a mess to manage, right? And if we're doing it in a microservices way, we can't share it really We have to essentially create immutable versions of it that are specific for each functionality. We have to really do some some really Selective domain modeling on you know How to make this really cohesive and how to make it really decoupled in a way that won't be an absolute nightmare to manage So this is the kind of assessment that we looked at so from an e y perspective This is our map of all the different areas in middleware or integration, right? And and I can understand how in a way not everybody thinks of this field or this area in the terms of middleware I actually think it's a pretty bad term as well, but in that specific case it was You know, they were called the middleware group So they were owning it and we were using terms to essentially Resonate with folks, but all the green stuff was essentially all the traditional Integration tools that you would typically have right very so an ESP centered and then The red stuff are a lot of things that you probably would have And running microservices you can obviously see there's a lot more red than green because It requires a whole lot more components just the smack stack itself is five things and And there's obviously a whole lot more running in there, right? and Then there's a lot of you know governance a lot of little aspects that that often get missed out so We essentially tried to Come up with what solutions do we need to bring in that helps us cover as many areas in this as we can and the least amount of time right and also with the least amount of money and Probably we don't want a solution per each of the boxes, right? We really try to optimize as much as we could So The other aspect of it is you know, you're trying to explain to people Why microservices, right? It's a quite an education for a lot of folks that don't understand the term Especially if you're talking to someone on the business side, which you know Most of the time they're the guys that are gonna fund your project And you have to explain to them what they're gonna get out of it So this was my attempt at it which There we go Which which was around explaining, you know the aspects of agility scalability Resiliency and those things so like going one by one, right? Find green functionality and quicker release times so I can little I'm gonna use the Example that I that I had with the hurricane. It's probably a good way to apply it so We had a situation where Our voyage because of Hurricane Irma There are two voyages one September 3rd and one September 10th the September 3rd one got extended from seven days, which is the typical duration to ten days and the September 10th one now was four days and began on September 13th Which is when the September 3rd one now ended so one that got extended by three days and one get shortened by three days, right? That is not a typical behavior that we expect from our voyages and so the way that we had built Some of this it had to be able to be flexible enough that when we haven't built the logic to Change some of these aspects. We weren't showing guests wrong information in the mobile app, right? and We were still honoring some of our product tenants, which one of them is the accuracy of information in that app and so The fine-grained aspect is really nice because in that situation specifically we have a voyage picker screen on the app By the way, if you guys want to look at it live the app that's running On DC OS if you look up Royal Caribbean International in the iOS or Google Play Store It's right there You know go on it leave a review if it sucks it sucks if it's great. It's great The service layer underneath it is what's built on DC OS and you know using some of the Principles here as well as the team that we did with this with I happen to think that it looks pretty slick and it's working really great So in terms of the quick release times etc, right? I was able to go individually to the service that you know the main page which is our voyage picker that lets you select which voyage you're on and Individually manipulate just that page without affecting anything else with a complete confidence that My app will stand up that no other page would be impacted, right that The app wouldn't go down just because of that and I would specifically if I Stay true to the API contract, right between the mobile and the microservice that everything will be just fine and that Confidence is really great because even though we have these white smoke sessions, right with the go no go I'm sitting there being like okay. I just tell me when right I can deploy this really easily Even though I have to answer like what's the impact of you know if we do this change etc I can basically always answer with well. It's really isolated the only thing impacted It's gonna be this label of this piece of text and it's gets manipulated by this piece of JSON in my API Right it doesn't impact anything else because that's running in completely separate container in a completely different service So there's no impact downstream. They don't share a database. They don't share anything. They're completely immutable I could launch three more if we want to take that one down You want to dissect it and look at under a magnifying glass you can I just need to you know route the traffic over and we can do it in production if you want to because The app is only going against this one service and it's isolated, right? In terms of the downtime what's really great about it is kind of the aspect I just talked about you know There's really zero downtime with the rolling deployments that we do we typically do things More prescriptive than just using kind of the restart or deploy option within DC OS So if you've played around with some of the options for zero downtime deployment that they come with marathon LB, but My preferred way of doing it is actually I'll call it kind of the vamp way or the canary release way which is essentially Spinning up an instance on its own that's Nice and good doesn't even have to be in the same pod can have a different name It has its own IP or its own service discovery DNS whatever it is rerouting my my actual live traffic to it and then The old instance I can take down. It's a rolling deployment, but it's a little bit more prescriptive as Opposed to mess those can handle it right like I can just do it all in DC OS have it Based on my upgrade strategy I can set up kind of the minimum amount of live ones and non-live ones etc But specifically at Royal this has been more effective because I can show people Right that the traffic is being routed here. You have nothing to worry about on the other side When you do some of the more mass deployments like some of the guys I've spoken out here to and like GE and Verizon where they have Their clusters are just huge and they're running way more workloads than we are The automation probably makes more sense right but for a lot of these things It's about the comfort level as well and getting that comfort level with some of these technologies for folks You know as they're very new and they coming on to it. It's important important to Do it in the right way? so I'm gonna blaze through this slide because I'm talking a little bit more than I Usually would have I think it's just a nervousness But we essentially ended up with two footprints, right? This is just a simplification, but To solve the first portion of it of the Same footprint ship and shore We essentially run the same exact thing ship and shore. It's really as simple as that, right? We have underneath here vSphere and underneath here ec2s on AWS, right and From there, it's really DCOS and up we were on Cassandra. We're on Kafka and From there, you know, we we do our API management through Apigee and that's that's essentially our structure the nice thing about that is It's exactly the same ship and shore same folder structure same service names I can take my Jenkins and Jenkins actually does a deployment to my Clyde DCOS and And our Jenkins actually lives in a completely separate like DCOS environment It's our dev environment and you can go deploy to any environment I want to because it's also centrally connected to our secret store and it has everything it needs to know and all the permission that it needs to Go put our code and all the other stuff that goes along with it and other clusters, which is really really convenient and then We have the confluent aspect in between right so we do use confluent Kafka to to power things up and You know, it's I think it's been really great working with them on that solution But one of the really great pieces that comes with kind of the enterprise confluent version is the replicator, right? Which you know the traditional like mirror maker that comes from the just the Apache project. It doesn't do enough to To really get you the capabilities that this does which essentially, you know If you've played around with Kafka connect it lets you just create a really simple and easy connector that makes sure that you're Replicating topic to topic across to Kafka clusters, right? Like usually you have your sync and source that are some sort, you know one of them is Kafka and something else is like a DB or you know a Search engine like elastic search or something like that in this situation. It's Kafka to Kafka and it's really great I mean, I could even have a case where I am essentially doing a replication of like duplicating a topic by Writing like you know using the replicator into my cluster as well to create too. So it's really great To have that flexibility for replication Alright, so overall From from our stack perspective here This was what we started out with I could say that Out of all the things on here that that we use, you know, it's been really great Writing things in Lagom especially if you have developers that have never Written microservices in our you know career Java Spring developers or just You know are really new to microservices our guys were Java devs for a long time We chose Lagom because it's a very opinionated framework on building microservices. So it really You know if you're concerned that your developers have kind of a cowboy mentality and can go build things like You know a hundred different ways, which I love developers. That's one of the best and worst things about them I Think that's something that helps you kind of harness that and and from an architect perspective is someone overseeing this It gives me a lot of peace of mind that they're building it in the right way You know we run things on rel You know Docker runtime, which we may or may not switch to The universal runtime sometime soon In terms of service discovery, we did we do a lot of the in cluster service discovery specifically for actual like Addressing between services using the built-in capabilities with marathon and kind of marathon DNS, etc But we actually found that using console for cross cluster service discovery is really useful So console gives us an opportunity to do service discovery across all the ships in one single pane of glass, right? So I can install Console agent on every ship and they all talk to each other using a gossip protocol that allows me to view every service That I have running across a ship of 40 a fleet of 40 ships, right? So it's it's a really great way for me from a monitoring perspective to go to one single pane of glass and see every Service in every cluster that's running how healthy it is and there's even opportunities to send metadata and things like that Into console to display as well along with it. So that that's really been great In terms of dynamic property management, you know, this is an interesting area We tried to do a lot of kind of the Netflix OSS things around like hot reload configuration stuff like that so that we could You know essentially change configuration without having to restart the service and there's a lot of really great solutions out there I can't really get into the specifics, but we do our config management and Console as well because it provides you the key value store and our micro services essentially each one of them is connected to console and is essentially watching it for changes relating to itself and If we want to for example turn on Like debug for example to go from info to a more verbose Logging level we can do it in console without restarting the service, which is Really nice and it gives us other capabilities if we want to change anything else within it But it really gives you a lot of flexibility and really changes the game in terms of zero downtime Like I don't even have to think about a rolling deployment I can literally go change a cell in a KV store and the service would pick it up In terms of circuit breakers we used kind of the built-in circuit breakers and legome We are working on a way to essentially instrument that using turbine and hysterics, but we haven't gotten there yet And I'm getting booted here, but Do I have time for questions, okay Sounds good. I'll just leave you guys here with just this slide so you can see a picture of the mobile app If you haven't downloaded, but let's open up for questions in which oh between ship and shore So honestly the way that we have our network running It's really just another The ship network essentially extends into our data center, right? and For us it's just another IP. So the way that we've been dealing with it We have done some troubleshooting in terms of latency and things like that, but Just to eliminate things along the way, right? There's probably an inordinate amount of Like load balancers and proxies along the way that you kind of have to deal with so we have done quite like one of the biggest pain points have been opening the right firewall ports to To Essentially get this thing flowing, but once we did and kind of have templatized it a little bit now We're able to take it from from ship to ship and then one of the things we're Looking into but struggling a little bit is configuring the right polling interval for for some of the Kafka replication that we're doing, but we're getting better and better at it, right? I think we started with Like every 24 hours for some of our things and we've knocked it down to You know for some of our more fragile most of them are real-time our more fragile systems are down to you know Two-hour updates, which really happy about that's from a you know from our AS 400 But everything else that's just purely running on here like our weather service our ship statistics things like that That's real-time across ship and shore. Oh, yeah, I I personally was not doing that But yes, we've had so many headaches Yeah Yeah, it's so it's you probably want to segment it a little bit, right? So there is data that is only Relevant to a voyage, right and then there's data. That's a little longer live. So we have things like There's even things that are only specific to a day of a voyage, right? So today we show things like the current weather sunrise sunset When the the gangway and the ports open and closed that's probably for that specific day, right? Then we have things like the activities for The whole voyage in which they they happen on what products are there, etc And that gets set up by our content team for each voyage It's that's gonna get more complicated as we start doing that on 40 ships right now We're only a one right so that process itself will get very complicated then we have very long-lived data, right? Our list of ships or list of ports The itineraries that each ship take for example the Allure goes Eastern Caribbean and Western Caribbean it alternates every Every week it always leaves on Sunday always comes back on a Sunday Some of that stuff doesn't change very often unless there's a hurricane Yeah Cool Anyone else? All right. Thank you everybody


Luffy's role model, an old and trusted friend. But is he actually Luffy's greatest foe? Hello my Nakamitachi, this is Joygirl and today we are going to be delving into a fun discussion about Shang's and the possibility of him being evil. As you may or may not have seen, Oda left us One Piece Man's a message at the Jump Festa 2021 very recently. And one teeny little line in particular has driven the community wild with hype and anticipation, which is that one red-haired man will make his move in 2021. Which fans have taken to mean that Shang's is the red-haired man in question, meaning Shang's will finally be taking action and we will be seeing more of this legendary character in the year to come. Now, as much as I do believe and hope that Oda was indeed referring to Shang's, we should keep in mind that there are many red-haired individuals in One Piece. For example, we have Kid and Ichigi, both of whom are fair candidates for appearing and making some move next year. But I do have to agree that this seems less likely and it does seem like Oda was referring to Shang's. But that also doesn't mean that we will be seeing anything very substantial next year. Oda often likes to evade our expectations and is a master at showing us just glimpses of characters and events to drive us crazy. Which is what he may well do next year, showing us just a snippet of Shang's even if the character he referred to was the red-haired Yonko. And for that very reason, rather than drive myself bonkers trying to figure out exactly what this move will be, we are going to be having a fun discussion on Shang's and a pretty wild one at that. And this has been spurred because I've seen a few comments on previous videos suggesting that Shang's is not who we think he is at all and rather that Shang's is evil. Okay, settle down. Before you think I'm crazy, I should mention that this isn't my own personal theory. I also haven't looked into it too much as to the reasons of why or how this would work, but it is something that has piqued my interest and has been lurking deep in my mind ever since I first came across this hypothesis. So, considering the recent news, I thought this would be an apt time to have a fun discussion on the possibility of Shang's being a villain and these are just my ideas as to how this could work or be explained and I'm sure people have either come across some others or have their own ideas so please do feel free to share them in the comments below. Also, I should stress that this is not a theory video. Personally, I still find it hard to believe that Shang's is evil even despite the fact that we hardly know anything about him, but it is nevertheless a fun discussion to have and at the end of the day with Oda, you never know what you're gonna get. So hey, maybe these crazy ideas will end up being right after all. And before we begin, I should advise that though this video will be mostly free of spoilers there will be a mention of a fact only known to manga readers but I will warn you when I am about to discuss this section so please feel free to continue watching. And with that being said, let's get into it. Part of why the fanbase is going wild with Oda's announcement is due to the fact that despite being almost 1000 chapters in, we have only seen Shang's a handful of times, but he was at the beginning of the story, quite literally being introduced in the first chapter to spark Luffy's adventure. And then of course, we found out that Shang's was a former crewmate on the former pirate king Goldie Rogers ship being an apprentice at a young age, meaning that Shang's was also figuratively part of the beginning of Luffy's journey. And these two facts are what cements Shang's as somewhat of a good guy in most of the fanbase's mind. First and foremost, he was the role model that taught Luffy invaluable lessons such as that friends are worth fighting for as well as saving the young boy, sacrificing his own arm in the process. His refusal to retaliate when Higuma taunted and insulted him was a defining moment that forms the idea that Shang's is the bigger man, only resorting to violence when his friends are in danger. And then in addition to that, Shang's being a former Roger pirate further establishes him to be one of the good characters in One Piece.  Roger is portrayed to be a man concerned with uncovering the world's truth and acquiring freedom. And with Shang's, a pirate of Roger's crew, it is natural to assume that he shares a similar philosophy. But what if these are Mr. X? What if Oda set us up for the biggest twist in One Piece? What if Shang's is not a good guy and is a villain after all? What if Shang's is actually a spy? Perhaps he was a spy even early on in his life ever since he was in Roger's crew. There are a few things that could contradict this, such as, and here is the manga spoiler to any anime-only fan so please get ahead to the time on the screen. Oda mentions in his journal that when Roger returned from finding the One Piece, he and Shang's talked separately, after which Shang's cried. Of course Shang's crying could simply be due to him being upset about his captain's impending death, but if we do assume Shang's is a spy, though we don't know the contents of their conversation, why would Shang's have this response, unless he cared about Roger or his mission regarding the One Piece? But this could be explained by the fact that A, despite being a spy, Shang's did come to love Roger, or B, Roger revealed to Shang's that he knew all along about his double-agent nature scaring Shang's, or even C, even despite knowing of Shang's identity as a spy, Roger loves and accepts the young boy anyways. Or even D, maybe Shang's only became a spy after Roger's death. Regardless of when he turned into a double agent, there are pressing questions, where depending on its answers, our reading of Shang's may be a lot darker, such as what was Shang's doing in Fusher Village in Chapter 1 anyways. Perhaps if he was a spy, having known of Roger's child, Shang's was keeping tabs on Ace, which is why he was at Galois Kingdom, staying close to report on Ace. Which does however beg the question of his meeting with Luffy, was it a coincidence? Or was he also keeping tabs on Luffy, the son of dragon, the most dangerous criminal in the world? Maybe Shang set Luffy up, and in this light, their encounter seems much more sinister, such as if Shang's was working with Hugu Ma so that he would have this shining moment where he would come save Luffy, thereby earning Luffy's trust and loyalty for the future. But then this does raise the question, who is Shang's working for? And the most obvious answer would be that he is part of the world government. He may even be part of the Celestial Dragons if his role as a spy began even as early as when he was part of Roger's crew. Or perhaps his lineage as a Celestial Dragon is something that Roger told him after Roger found the One Piece. Shang's relationship to the Celestial Dragons is something that I will actually be discussing in greater, more serious detail in another video. But for the purposes of this discussion, maybe Shang's is connected to the Celestial Dragons and with Luffy, an individual who has the will of the D, Shang's has been keeping tabs on him too. And there are other points that may suggest Shang's relationship to the world government or to the Celestial Dragons within the series. Firstly, his appearance at Marine Food. Shang's was able to single-handedly bring the war to a halt. Sure, he's a Yonko, but so was Whitebeard. So what sort of leverage does Shang's hold to be able to command so much power? If he was a Celestial Dragon, the world government's acquiescence would make sense, which would similarly explain Shang's exchange with the Gorosei. Despite his status as a pirate and a Yonko at that, the five elders still allowed him an audience and even treated him with respect, arranging a time which Shang's requested. The pirate that Shang's discussed with the elders has been assumed by many to be Blackbeard, as a dangerous individual who requires the attention of the world government. But what if the pirate that Shang's was approaching them about is Luffy? Back at Punk Hazard, Luffy says that he will eventually defeat all of the Yonko and that he would not want to fight Shang's first. When Luffy said this, he put up three fingers, suggesting that Shang's may not even be included in Luffy's list of Yonkos to defeat if Blackbeard is included instead. But we know how tricky Oda can be. What if this is a foreshadowing that Shang's will be Luffy's final opponent? Crazy. Because there are still some remaining questions that may be linked to Shang's being evil. Such as what he said to Kaido when he went to intercept the other Yonko at Marineford, or why he even went to stop Kaido. Was this related to a possible enmity against Luffy? Because since the most recent chapters, which I won't actually spoil in terms of content, so anime only viewers you're safe to continue listening, we would be led to assume that Kaido and Shang's were discussing Ace, but what if their interaction actually concerned Luffy? Which still wouldn't explain why Shang's stopped the war to save Luffy, unless it's part of a deeper plan that requires Luffy to survive up to some point. In any case, whilst it's not the most obvious conclusion, perhaps Oda will reveal Shang's true nature in 2021. Shang could be a world government spy, he could be the leader of a certain secret world government unit that has only been revealed to Manga readers so far in The One on Arc, or be even connected to the celestial dragons. Whilst this isn't really a theory video, I do think it's very thought provoking to consider the idea of Shang's being a villain. So if you have answers to any of my questions or any other supporting points as to why or how Shang's may be evil, please do leave a comment below. On that note, I am preparing a more serious, but equally wild theory about the Red Head Pirate, so if you are not already subscribed, please do so so that you will be notified when this new video is released. Please also like and share if you enjoyed today's video. This is Joygirl, and I'll see you again soon.


The primary aim of critical thinking and science in general is to try and derive what we might call objective knowledge. Critical thinking is not philosophy where we might be searching for some form of absolute truth with a capital T. Critical thinking and science are much more practical in their nature. Rather than aiming for an absolute truth, they are looking for knowledge that works. That is to say knowledge that remains relevant under scrutiny from many different perspectives and within many different frames of reference. This is objective knowledge in that it is not contingent upon a specific subject or context but is relevant to many different contexts. This objective knowledge we may call logic. Things in our world work in a particular way because of the logic governing them. To understand that logic we understand how they work. And this is a very practical measure of knowledge. With science and critical thinking we're trying to develop standards and methods for deriving this objective knowledge about the world around us and we can call this objective knowledge logic where logic is simply the way things work. Thus at the heart of critical thinking is this idea of logic and in this section we'll be exploring this very big and fundamental idea from a number of different perspectives.


Welcome to It's About Time on ThinkTech from our downtown studio at the core of Honolulu. I'm your host Becky Sampson, a professional speaker, author, and coach. Do you have an idea for a business and wonder what it takes to make that happen? And maybe you have a business but might be struggling to get it off the ground, or you might be thriving in your business and want to take it to the next level. Joining me here in the studio today is Celestra Thomas, principal broker and owner of Soldier to Soldier Real Estate, host of a radio show called Real Life Real Estate, and most importantly as serial entrepreneur. Today we're going to be talking about, so you want to be an entrepreneur and about what it takes to start, sustain, and thrive in seeing your ideas come to light. So welcome Celestra. Thank you Becky. Or Lester. Whichever way. Just don't call me after 2.30 a.m. I'll try not to. I love, I'm so grateful that you're here today because I was on your radio show actually. Yes she was. A great guest. What was that? A couple months ago? A couple months ago, yeah. Yeah, it's fun. He goes, just show up and we'll just talk. He's like, okay. You fit right in. It was a great thing. That was a very easy show. You can have a, just a dialogue. You know, and then with you having that Real Estate background that helps so much, also on the show. Yeah, you know, we were kind of talking earlier. I was in Real Estate for many, many years and did property management, but also high end and first time home building and stuff like that. So that was kind of fun that we connected and we met, I don't know, back in April? April or May or something like that. And I know when I came on your radio show, we talked a little bit before it and you had some amazing ideas of how you've been able to grow your business in being an entrepreneur and being successful at that. Before we kind of get into that part of it, what are some of the things and challenges that you see with being an entrepreneur? Like what, there's some stuff, right? Me is making sure I get enough sleep. Self-care. Well, I only sit at it because I understand when I went into this thing that either I'm all in or I'm not and I think that's the biggest thing for anybody that's thinking about starting a business or they currently have a business. You got to either be all in or not because there's so many days where you're going to be tired. You're getting phone calls late at night, but if you're all in and you understand it before you go into it, it's not a problem. How do people, in your experience, maybe for you or for the people that you've worked with, how do you see that they get all in? What does it start with? I think sometimes a lot of people look at entrepreneurship as, it seems to be the new fad now.  Now entrepreneurship seems to be the thing because of sometimes the TV and you see the people with the nice cars and all that stuff and they're entrepreneurs, but I really think what it really takes is you got to love what you do and then you don't work a day in your life. It doesn't seem like when you're working, exactly, when you're working 18, 19-hour days and people are like, oh you work so much and like, no I didn't work an hour today, you know, because I actually love what I do, you know. What started you being an entrepreneur, how old were you? I was 26, I think. And you're 27 now, right? Yeah, 24, I'm going backwards. Just wanted to make sure. So I started a non-medical emergency transportation company called Count on Us. As a matter of fact, I still keep one of the hats and shirts on the day. And what's that called? Count on Us. Count on Us. Yeah, it was a non-medical emergency transportation company. What most people didn't know, and I didn't know this at the time either, was Lurie, you could transport patients. I Lurie bought three youths and molasses, had them fixed up, and I started working for contracts from the hospitals and stuff in order to take care of the dialysis, run records back and forth. And I don't know where I could decide who you're from, but I know I wanted to do something. I was actually still in the Army full-time at that time also, so Lurie, I was playing G.I. Joe from 9 to 5, and then on the weekends and after that, I was doing a little night company. And the great thing about that company is I feel miserably. Okay, but so that's part of entrepreneurship. Exactly, and that's my problem. You've got to be okay to fail. Yeah. You have to understand that you're going to fail. Yeah. Well, and I often like to say, fail faster so you can succeed quicker. Exactly. Because when you, when it's not a level of judgment towards that, it just worked or it didn't work.  You've got to look at the lessons that are there, and how, I mean, how important is that as an entrepreneur? Well, I think our school system sometimes used the word fail and failure is a bad thing. Yeah, big F. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But if you look at most successful companies and you go back and talk to the head of those companies, they fail a lot, you know, and that was part of the process, and it wasn't looked at as a bad thing, it looked as a part of the process in order to get to where you wanted to go. So what did, what did you think you learned from your first venture? I had no idea what I was doing, but the point of it is it's okay. Yeah, it's okay. You got to start from somewhere, and you got to start by working the channels and I think the biggest thing was the educational side of it from who I contact, reading books every day, getting into the self-development of it. Exactly. There are tons of self-development now. I'm going to tell you my weakness. My weakness is, especially when I hire other people is I think they should be like me and self-develop, and I quickly realize everyone just doesn't think that way and operate that way because I'm always having my entrepreneur hat on. Okay, why doesn't that person not self-develop that? I'm looking at the big picture where they're hired for a specific reason. Exactly. And that is a difficult thing for an entrepreneur because you want it to run the way that we see it, and that's not everybody thinks like us, right? You think everybody should. Why are you not self-developing? Why are you not reading? Well, and I always say go into business and that's the best way to learn your weakness and your strengths. And to be able to, this is a principle that I teach with entrepreneurs is you find your strengths, right, and find your weaknesses and find somebody else that that's their strength, and they become part of your team. Oh, I love that. Oh, gosh. Because I clearly think they were. We've got to build our team of leaders, my friend. And I tell, by the fact I just hired another assistant, and she was my old assistant before and now she's coming back on.  Yeah. Oh, there you go. Not to enhance my screen because I have those, but I'm hiring you to cover up my weakness, and that's the main purpose. Yeah. Yeah, and that's important. That's a really important aspect, especially when you're going out because entrepreneurs try doing it on their own. And they think that they're an island and that they think that they have to row. I remember I was having a conversation with one of my business partners and I said to him, I said, get out of all of the things that you need to do, you know, to be able to move forward. You got to get this person doing this and this person doing this. But oftentimes we don't have a lot of resources. Yeah. So you said back on your very first go at it in being entrepreneur, you learned that, you know, a lot of your stuff was self-development. You learned what you're weak and what you're strong at. And I was doing everything. I was doing mom and pop versus trying to actually build a business. Right. I was the driver. I was the person that was taking the appointments. I was the guy that was cleaning them. I was trying to do everything in order to save a dollar. But what I quickly realized is I can't grow. That way. And in order for me to grow, I should be able to walk into my business and no one needs me. And I think sometimes it's hard for a lot of people to let go. I'm waiting on that day when I can walk in and I'm like, what are you doing here? I don't need you here. So what advice would you have for yourself on that first go out? At first go out, what I would change different would probably be to actually read a little more than I did, even though I read every day. Yeah. I literally read about two or three pages a day. And so if I read two or three pages a day and I learned something new every day, then I'm growing. Then I'm growing. Right. And so develop you. So you went from that. What kind of, what was your next venture? My next venture, you won't believe it's actually, I bought a McDonald's franchise. Oh, really? And I went out to Hamburger University out in Florida when they had it out in Florida then. And I thought it was about the fries and the burgers. Mm-hmm. And I was so far from that field. It's a real estate business, right? Exactly. It was all about real estate. Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm. It's what their location is where, where they at. And what I learned from is there's so much psychology behind and in business. Mm-hmm. At this time when I went to Hamburger U, it was the credit card thing was coming out. Right. Right. Where they were testing credit card machines at McDonald's. Mm-hmm. And seeing if there was a growth and purchases because there was a machine versus there wasn't a machine. Mm-hmm. And what they found out was people had the tendency to spend more. Yeah. If they swiped it. Uh-huh. Versus if they paid cash. Yep. You know what I'm saying? Because I asked a guy at a meat one. I said, why don't we have a psychologist at McDonald's? I mean, we've done a ton of people out there eating fries or something on that. What's the point? Yeah. What? It's all psychology. Psychology and selling, right? Exactly. It's a great, I mean, if you're an entrepreneur, that's a great audio. Have you ever listened to that one? Psychology of selling? Yep. Oh, yeah. It's understanding why people buy what they buy and how they make those decisions. And it's all psychology. I mean, everything in life, but same thing with our own psychology, you know, and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. I think what's bad for us sometimes though is when someone's trying to sell us, at least for me, there's no in-between with me. Mm-hmm. If I wanted, I'm the easiest seller. If I don't want it, you're just wasting your time. Yeah. But that is also, that's something I always say too, is you can't say the right thing to the wrong person. And you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. Meaning, I mean, they want it or they don't. Right? Exactly. We don't have to sell anything when you're doing it the proper way. So, in that kind of thing. So, you went from McDonald's and then, is that what got you into real estate? When I got into real estate, I started flipping houses just because I wanted to do something. I had to be busy going, I just never had the ability to sit still and go to the beach and enjoy. I just couldn't, it made me feel like I was missing something. Right. And this is my whole time in the army. So, I left McDonald's and started flipping houses in Oklahoma. Mm-hmm. I spent 20 years in the army after that. I bought houses every time I PCS. I was like, oh man, it's about time to retire. What do I want to do? Mm-hmm. So, the natural transition was to go into real estate. Right. You know. And you know, I think we've talked about this too, is how much of your background of being in military and that structure has played a part in your success in your company and your entrepreneurship. I think the biggest thing is you don't go home until the job is done. Yeah. Probably the biggest thing. Yeah. And I quickly realized, here sometimes it's not the same thought process.  Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm. You know, it's always tomorrow. Mm-hmm.  Right. And then when it's done, then you go home. And you do it correctly. Yes. Right. Oh, it's a long night. Or else you just keep taking the test over again and just keep doing it over until you get it right. So, I took something from every job I had. I was actually a recruiter in the military. And at this time when I was a recruiter, now we're asking, there was three wars going on. Yeah. So, I'm going into parents' house and asking their young daughters and sons to the military and knowing that there's three wars going on. Yeah. The problem with them going to war is very high. Mm-hmm. And was it tough? Yes. Oh, yeah. But again, I learned so much about the psychology of people. What did you learn? Let's... Who is the influencer? Who is the person that's making the decision? Mm-hmm. And what we quickly found out was it was the mom, not necessarily the kids that were making the decision. So, if you could influence the mom, that it was a good idea for Johnny to join the army. Yeah. Then, Johnny would join the army. Mm-hmm. It was really about finding the influencer. And even today, it's in real estate the same way. When I go into someone's house, there's always either the wife or the husband. Okay, but which one, typically? Here, it's been the wife. Is it? Yeah. It's the same thing when I did it for years, too. It's usually the wife that makes that decision, because this is her home, right? Yeah. This is where they're going to resign. The husband's like, whatever. But of course, when they see the closet, they're like, okay, I'm taking all of that. Yeah. They always make that joke, right? That the woman's going to take the whole entire closet and the guy can be in the hallway. That sounds familiar. So, yeah. So, let's just take a break right now, actually. We're going to go on to the break. When we come back, let's talk more about the challenges and also some of the things that you have really worked for you to take you to the next step of entrepreneurship, because you have some really great things to say or concepts that I know that if people apply them into their businesses, that they're going to be able to take it to the next level. Absolutely. So, yeah, we'll be taking a break. I'm Becky Samson. This is, it's about time on Think Tech. And we're talking to Celeste or Tom Thomas about, so you want to be an entrepreneur. So, stay tuned for more. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads, where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world. Won't you join us on thinktechhawaii.com or on YouTube on the Think Tech Hawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant, and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Wendy Lowe, and I want you to join me as we take our health back. On my show, all we do is talk about things in everyday life, in Hawaii or abroad. I have guests on board that will just talk about different aspects of health in every, in every way. Whether it's medical health, nutritional health, diabetic health, you name it, we'll talk about it. Even financial health. We'll even have some of the Miss Hawaii's on board. And all the different topics that I feel will make your health and your lifestyle a lot better. So come join me. I welcome you to take your health back. Mahalo. Hi, we're back. And I'm Becky Sampson, the host of It's About Time. I'm with Celester Thomas, and we're talking today about, so you want to be an entrepreneur. So before we break, we kind of were talking about some of the challenges and the journey really that you've been on as an entrepreneur. And you're now, and a couple of the businesses that you've been involved in, what are you doing now? I mean, you've done some McDonald's stuff and you did some other earlier businesses. And now you're in real estate. I mean, obviously you're retired from the military. Right. And so you call your real estate company soldier to soldier. I call, yeah, soldier to soldier for white royalty. There's a reason behind that. I won't go into details. Well, give us a little snapshot. What made you want to? Originally, I had another name. Uh-huh. And I received a phone call from a lawyer that says, hey, you need to cease and desist using that name. And mine, you had it all the research looked up and it was never filed or anything else. Mm-hmm. So the entrepreneur and me say, I'll just change the name where it's very close. Mm-hmm. But still within the... Guidelines. Guidelines. Yeah. And the funny thing is, me and either the guy there, we're fighting over that name. Mm-hmm. None of us can use it today. Mm-hmm. I'm not sad. Yeah. It's an obstacle. But again, again, it's part of being an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. I mean, that's why I tell people there's going to be tons of challenges in the way. Yeah. How do you adjust and move past those challenges? Yeah. Yeah, because it's definitely, I know on the screen, they've got your website. Soldier to soldier, Hawaii Real Estate, or Realty. And there's actually, let's just talk real quick, since this is up. I was talking to you before the show. I think it's really interesting because what's happening right now in this industry of real estate, a lot of homes are coming up. Talk a little bit about that, how the Airbnb is causing a lot of people to put their homes up. You know, the funny thing is I had an Airbnb expert guy on the radio show, which he brought a lot of insight to, one, the changes, the areas, and how some places were in the zone, where you can do Airbnb. And now they're outside of that zone. What you see a lot now is, people are putting their properties up because... Yeah, because they don't want to get stuck. Yeah. And a lot of that Airbnb income that they were getting was supplementing their income, one, the pay for the house, and two, their lifestyle. Yeah. And I never looked at it from that point of view. That's how you write, you know. It affects people on both sides of the aisle. Yeah. And at the same time, if you're living in a community... Mm-hmm.  Oh, yeah. But if you're living in a community, that may be a nuisance to you. So I kind of understand both sides of it. Yeah. Now, I'm not sitting on each side of the aisle, but I do understand both sides of the issue and why some are wondering in the area and some don't want it in the area. Because you know Hawaii is pretty expensive to live here, you know. Yes. Really? You think? Just a little bit, you know. People always use milk. I don't even drink milk. We got to pay the price to live in paradise, my friend. Exactly. That's what I always say. But I think that that's... So the point with that with entrepreneurs is, again, I love the thing that's expected and unexpected, right? Yeah. I mean, you're in a business, and the business is going a certain way, and then all of a sudden something comes into play, like a law, past, or something, and it changes the dynamics. Exactly. So talk about how important it is as an entrepreneur to be adjustable and to be viable to children. I think it's very important to be a foreseer. And why I say that is, there's a billion dollar company that just went out of business. They're called the company's name. Right. Because they didn't foresee Amazon and the way a lot of people do what now? Shop online. Shop online. And that's how they... Especially here in the island. Exactly. So those companies that got affected by that didn't foresee it. They saw a lot of people. And I think I read the general order corner or something and it was like, oh, no, people still want to come into the store and touch and feel the products and stuff like that, which is not the case anymore. It's not. Isn't that interesting? Tesla Psychology comes in at right. But people have it so changing. It's almost, yeah. And I think it's really interesting because I know when the water first came out, I thought, who in the world is going to pay for bottled water? Eight dollars of water. And now nobody is going to drink regular water because of that. And it's kind of interesting to see this shift that's happened with our buying. And regardless of what business you're in, you've got to be able to see where the trends are and stay up with other things that are happening in the communities that can affect your business. Instead of just going, well, this is... For instance, let me give you an example. My family, we own a summer camp for kids. And for 46 years in Southern Utah and all the national parks, it was kind of more of a business where rich kids came to because it was a little more expensive and adventurous. But the way that we marketed was to go to these shows, the camping shows. Camping shows, right. And that's just how my dad's done it for 40 years, right? But as the internet started coming and as people started sharing pictures, I remember going, well, we've got like this, these little disposable cameras and we're going to have to get them just, you know, and then on there so people can share their experiences. And they're like, you can't do that. That's like privacy issues. It's different.  We went out of business and this is just my way of looking at it. But it's because we kept doing the things that we did for so long and didn't conform kind of to the new way and get into the psychology again and into the social realm of sharing those photos because that was not okay 20 years ago. And now it's like, what are you kidding me? I want my kids. I want to know what they did two seconds ago. Exactly.  But it's very different. So that's another great concept is to stay up with what's going, you know, be able to look in the future. I always admire the NFL of being out of business and being out of industry and then on Snapchat. It's not funny. I don't even know how to use Snapchat. Exactly. You never thought the NFL was on Snapchat. You can literally go to Snapchat and see the NFL on them posting stuff on Snapchat. Okay, so are you on Snapchat? Yes, I am. Okay. I know you're on Snapchat. You're also on YouTube. I'm on YouTube. I'm on... I stalked you. I'm on Craigslist. You're not on Craigslist? No. Come on, a real situation. It's not... Anyway, so you're on Snapchat. You're on... I'm on Snapchat, YouTube. I'm on... What is it? TikTok. I've never even heard that one. I've seen you never even heard TikTok. Well, I obviously won't find you there. Are you on Instagram? Instagram, yep. Okay. All the social media platforms.  Okay, so this is another concept of entrepreneurship, right? You've got to be willing to think outside the box and put yourself in all those different... And they're all free... You can't think like how you would go buy something or find something. You always have to look at how the majority of people are finding things. Right. And where they're at. And where they're really good at because I do stalk you. So, you know. Okay. What is it?  You know what I mean? Usually they're all very proper and they... I think there was one that you were on the bus. Oh, yeah. I was on the bus. You and your... I was saying, get on the bus when the market was changed. Yeah. So you have to... And nowadays in marketing, you've got to be even that much more creative. But then also talk about how sometimes that can be overwhelming. We feel like we have to do everything. Like how do you manage all of that? One day at a time. I love that answer. That is a great answer. One day at a time. But I really believe, and this isn't me studying people, I really believe people like seeing people in that natural environment. Absolutely. And the way I act on my social media platform, this is the way I act while I'm on TV, making a commercial, it doesn't matter on radio, I'm the same person. And I think people gravitate to that more than anything else. Well, and I love that you said... Because people... What I've learned about social media is that they want to see you, like not advertising, because that's... People get really, really tired of being advertised and be sold to. Oh, tell me about it. They like to be entertained. And so when you do something, if you can put marketing with entertaining them, like being on the bus, that's called Stick To It. What is that book? It's called Suck. I can't remember. I can't remember. You know what I mean? Made to Stick. Made to Stick. Because that's what sticks in our brain.  You know the funny thing, my first TV commercial I did, this is my two, three years now. And I was debating whether or not... I said, you know what? I was about to get tired of being locked in the contract. I was looking for... What is consumers tired of being? Different. They don't like being in contract. You know how I solve this problem? It's something that can bother me. They're not happy. And I sent it on the commercial and I recorded it. Some people at the station were like, ah, it's a little harsh. And I was like, no, it's not. And literally the day before, I was about to take it out. And they looked at it and said, no, just leave it in and this will help. And I left it in. So literally to this day, matter of fact, this didn't happen yesterday.  I love it. So that's what they remember me by. Of course.  Right.  You know, I'm like, no, I'm crying too though. You're selling your house. So why do you think the whole, you're fired bit, you know, that's been a social thing with Trump. You know, you're fired from entrepreneurs. Some people confuse that. I also thought I got it from Trump, but I just know that people don't like being in contracts. I don't like being in contract. So it's like, what do I do to alleviate that problem? Well, and it alleviates their stress and their objection, right? And understanding objections and entrepreneurship is when you're in business, you got to know what they're thinking so that you can speak to that and the objections to be able to give them what they really want.  Yeah. If you say, yep, I'm going with this person, it will take a lot for that person to say, you know what, I'm going in another direction. Right. So that's a psychology I understand. Even though I say that, I understand it's still hard for people to know. Say, you know what, I want to go in another direction. You know? So again, that goes back to the psychology of the way people think and act in certain things. That's awesome. So as we wrap up, where do people find you? We know that it's social media, right? Social media. You can go to my website at www.SoldierSoldierHawaii.com. You can call me at<PHONE_NUMBER>. I don't even think I had your number. I need your number. Nope, I think we're going through Facebook. Facebook. Social media. I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here today. No, thank you for having me on. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and out-of-the-box thinking and being an entrepreneur and showing people that you can be really successful if you get creative and like you say, jump off the cliff, right? Just jump. You just got to jump. Where about it? We'll say it to bottom later. Just jump and the wings will show up. I promise you. I promise. I promise. So thanks so much. We're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up. I'm Becky Sampson with It's About Time on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. We've been talking to Celestor Thomas with Soldier to Soldier Real Estate and thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks to our broadcast engineer, our floor manager and to Jay Fidel, our executive producer who puts it all on together. And of course, I'll see you next Wednesday for It's About Time on ThinkTech. I'm Becky Sampson. Mahalo, everyone.