Okay, welcome everybody to Sunday here at Scale 14x. And for our first speaker today in this track, we're going to have Brian Profit. Brian will be telling us about finding the value here in open source projects. Brian is a Currently Principal Community Analyst for Red Hat's open source and standards team. He's a long time member of the open source software community and he's authored several books on Linux, iOS and other odd operating systems. He's also a former technology journalist for ReadWrite, IP World, Linux Planet and Linux Today. Let's all welcome Brian. Thank you. Okay, so the topic of this talk is going to be talking about something that's probably near and dear to a lot of people in the open source community. This idea that community and business do not necessarily always get along. This is a common thread throughout a lot of companies. We see this in new startup entrepreneurial situations. We also see this in even established open source companies like Red Hat and Sousa and Canonical. This is a common thread where there seems to be this little push pull pseudo adversarial, sometimes not pseudo adversarial relationship between the idea of community and business. And the nature of this talk is to sort of dispel this notion that they have to be at odds with each other at all. And this kind of has come up in my tenure at Red Hat because surprisingly, even though Red Hat is regarded as one of the purest, for lack of a better term, open source companies out there, there's still a lot of this internal struggle on a daily basis within our different teams. A lot of this is because community can be generally fairly confusing to a lot of people. The approach that people can take with community can vary as wildly between like, okay, this is a group of users that we're going to respect and we're going to take care of and we're going to give them lots of nice things and make them feel good to an actual participatory community, whereas we need these people to help us with our project. But even then, that becomes a little bit of a nuanced relationship because sometimes you can do that and say, well, we're using this community as a resource, but that's all we're doing. We're not really going to give them anything back. We're not going to give them the same what's going on to whatever regard is better forms of community, which are participatory and on all levels. It's a two-way street. So kind of nailing this down is something that's very important when we all look at community and try to figure out what it is we want and what it is we should be doing. And I think that even if companies have different goals with community, there's still some basic rules of the road that they should follow and make life better for everybody, even if it does seem like it's a drain on resources or we're giving something away and not getting anything back. Because this confusion can create a divide. This divide shows up in any open source company out there. I named a few earlier, but I could probably universally say that if you could think of a commercial company that is working with open source in any way, shape, or form, there is going to be at some point, and probably more often than you think, a divide between what is regarded as the traditional business side versus the community side. And how that divide is bridged is an interesting case, because sometimes what we see is that the divide will actually be bridged by, let's say, okay, well, let's make community part of marketing. Okay, and if it's part of marketing, we understand marketing. Marketing is a business function. We will make it part of that and we will treat it like that as a marketing line item, basically. Okay, that's a way to go, but it might not necessarily be the best way to go because at that point you're really, you're getting into the point where you're treating that community as a resource to be mined, and that is probably not your best approach to handling community. When you think about how businesses think of community, you know, businesses traditionally are very much lined up along the bottom line. That's what a business does. In the public company in most countries, you're required by law to make as much money as you can. And if you're a private company, you know, you're pretty much going to feel the same way. You're trying to try to get as much revenue that you can squeeze out of your product and your company and your team as you can. Okay, it's crass, but money is a very big driver here. Okay, and I'm not really saying anything that's, like, hugely new. But, you know, when you think about it from a project point of view, and I've kind of been digging business a little bit and putting this all on them and saying, well, they don't understand community. Well, there's the opposite problem too. Let's be fair. A lot of community projects that work with corporate entities often feel like we're not about the money man. You know, we don't want to be, you know, dealing with that. That's not our problem. We're here to create something good and pure and solid. So they sort of, they can almost be, from the opposite side, adversarial and stiff-arming, you know, commercial entities and trying to keep them away. So it's, you know, it takes to the tango. So it's not just the businesses maltreating the communities. The communities can kind of be the same way about the businesses as well. This can be an adversarial relationship at times. Okay. And it doesn't have to be. Okay. Community can be regarded as a resource. But it doesn't have to be the kind of resource that is, like, set up in its own little area and self-contained and it doesn't do anything else beyond that. People don't always get community, but people know that they want it. So many companies want to be, to have a community. Obviously Red Hat, we want to have a community going, and we do with a lot of, many of our open source projects. In fact, well, all of them that we actually directly support. But it's not just pure companies like, pure open source companies like Red Hat. McAfee, they have a community infrastructure. Google does. ENC, Canonical, just going down. Charles Schwab, Charles Schwab, when I was researching this, I'm like, okay, they want to have a community manager, but their community is around their users. And that's okay. That's a viable community. But, you know, what does that look like as far as participation? What does that look like for growth? What does that look like for people? You know, what did their users get out of this? And what does Charles Schwab get out of this? You know, how many people here remember when Saturn came out, the cars? Do you remember that they had, they used to have the cool picnics and everything like that? And they would have the commercials on the TV and everything. And you would literally, I was too poor to buy a new car at that point in my life, but I was like literally sitting there thinking, I want to get a Saturn so I can go to these picnics, you know, and show up. That was actually, I got to give GM props for that. That was a cool idea for community and it was a brilliant strategy for getting people invested and inclusive in this community of Saturn owners. And I, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for Saturn because of that. Then I actually drove one and maybe not so much, but you know, whatever. So Tom's, the huge company, you know, buy one, give one, they have a community infrastructure as well. But where did they get the value? Each one of those companies that I mentioned has a different form of community. Red Hat's communities are about developing code. They're about building projects. They're about, you know, contributory free and open source software projects. That's vastly different goals than Tom's and Charles Schwab, who are both very much in the user community point of view. So how are they going to get value out of their communities? Why are they bothering with this? And the cynical part of us can sit here and say, you know what, they're not really in the community. They're just doing this as a marketing strategy. They're just doing this to try to get people to feel good and feel nice when basically what they're setting up is a bunch of targeted users that they can get online on and monitor and track and get their habits and whatnot and figure out how to sell things better. Yeah, that may be true. Okay, the problem is this. When software companies do this with free and open source software projects, that becomes a problem. There's very little chance for me, if I, you know, my daughters buy Tom's all the time. They love the shoes, they love the idea of the buy one, give one, and, you know, they're good shoes. So they love them, but they're never going to, like, contribute a design for a new shoe to Tom's. That's not what that community is about. You know, they're going to vote with a pocketbook. So if a shoe line is successful, it's not because people participated in the creation of that shoe line.  So we have to be very careful here, because there's been a trend lately, and that's sort of the origin of this talk, where a lot of companies in software land who are distributing open source code are taking that idea of, you know, community as a marketing arm, and they're running a little bit far with that. I want to be very careful when I continue with this talk. As you go, you might be hearing threads of things that, like, hmm, he doesn't like the Apache license.  That is actually not what this is about. I have no problems with restrictive licenses. I have no problems with permissive licenses.  You can still have full participation with permissive license, or not. Okay. But you still have to deliver value to your community, and the way, and when you do that, you're going to get full value for your company as well. So let's look at one side of this. Let's look at the business value and where they get. What does a business need when they talk about value? Well, okay, so the business value, or as far as community, sorry. So, again, and I've said this several times already, the business value for community, it's obviously, okay, one, it's good marketing. And even at Red Hat, we do this. The fact that we're, you know, over at the next building, we've got a booth over there. We've got stickers. We've got t-shirts. We've got swag. We've got brochures. You know, all these things, and all of our companies that are here are doing this. We are advocating our communities. Okay. We are, we are holding them up to the world, and we are saying, these are the communities that we work with, and we are happy to work with them, and we want you to be a part of them. Okay. You will never be able to separate marketing from community in a commercial infrastructure. Okay. It can't be done, nor should it be done.  It's always going to be there. That's part of my job as a community analyst. That's part of any community manager's job. If they do any form of advocacy, that is marketing. And to do that, when they do that, they're building loyalty. I'm building brand loyalty with stickers. I'm building project loyalty with, you know, hopefully a low barrier to entry for participation, and getting people good documentation so they can jump into their project more easily. And awareness, mentioned that already. Support. And I'm sorry, my slides here are very tiny, so I'm having trouble reading ahead of time. You know, that's another value for community. And a lot of software companies are actually, this is a big part of what they do with community as well. It's easier to support your software when your community is there helping. You know, if I could, you know, save a little money, and if I have an active and vibrant user community, and, you know, somebody comes along and says, hey, I'm having a problem with feature X, Y, or Z, and it's great if there's a user mailing list or a forum somewhere where I can point them and I can say, hey, you know, go here first, see if somebody's asked that same question. And it's wonderful that that question's already been answered. Your community has done your support work for you. So you've reduced your support costs. So that's a great business value for community. On the product side, you're going to get a higher adoption rate. And this is actually something, I'll be honest, this is something we do at Red Hat all the time, and this is something that Susan does, and you know, Canonical is doing as well. The more people that use Overt, which is a virtual data center management platform, and I kind of pick on it because that was my last community manager role, the more people that use that by mere attrition alone, we're going to pick up some commercial users of Rev, which is the commercial downstream. The more people that use Fedora or CentOS, the more people that we're going to see pick up Rel, which is where we sell the support for and this is where we generate revenue. I could say the same thing about the relationship between OpenSUSA and SUSA, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're all open about this, this is the thing. If you want to run OpenSUSA in the enterprise and you can do it and make that work, SUSA is all for that, you know. And if you need some help along the way, they've got the infrastructure and the ecosystem that they'd like to invite you in and be a part of their commercial product. Same thing with Canonical, same thing with Red Hat and so forth and so on. Providing a strong and vibrant community brings a definite bottom line value add as far as higher adoption rate of your commercial product, just by mere attrition alone. And you're going to see more spending on product as you go. So you're going to adopt the product later and long term, if a community is strong, we've seen evidence that you're going to end up spending a lot more spending on the product long term. Now these are actually not my ideas, Erica Cole from Salesforce, and I've got this URL, it probably won't be very visible in the video, but I do invite you to go back and look at the slides that were with this presentation and pull that URL up because she does a very good, detailed explanation of the value of community from the Salesforce side, and this is coming from a company that is not necessarily regarded as an open source company, really. But a lot of what she is saying is true for software in particular and pretty much any business, whether it's open source or not. Now the community reaction to a lot of this, and I hinted at this before, that the community is not always friendly about this, is not the most positive thing in the world. It's gotten a lot better, but in the past, I remember when 2001, when IBM started making the rounds and investing a billion dollars in Linux software development, and Red Hat was becoming prominent and Oracle was coming in and being a big player, people were very wary of business people. They wanted to stay pure. I'm going to stay with Debian because I do not want to sell my soul to you. We still see that, and I'm not making fun of that attitude at all. That is a totally valid, if you don't want to have any dealings with commercial entities, fine. Because commercial entities, I work for one, but we're not perfect. And because of our size, we can do unintentional damage sometimes, and I can respect that people do not want to be involved in that. So the community reaction to a business approach to community is usually one that is regarded with suspicion and definitely wearing us, if not outright suspicion. So we talked about the value of community as far as products are concerned. Okay. What does a project get out of community? Well, obviously growth. When you are a community manager, one of the first things you're going to try to do, if you haven't done it already, is measure the growth of your community. And that can be measured in a whole bunch of different ways. Because the idea is basically, the more your project is growing, the stronger it is. If you have people leaving your project in droves, there's a problem. And it might not even be your problem. It could be that there's better technology down the road. I don't want to really contribute to this project anymore. I want to go and contribute to project Y because I think their stuff is cooler. And then that leads to itself. Or you have people who leave where they're saying I want to leave because I don't like the way this project is run. Or I'm having a personality problem with the people at the top. These are all valid reasons why people leave. So obviously then growth indicates that your project is going to be stronger. Okay. I count on that because that can turn on you in a second. So you've got to look at trends more than day-to-day things. You've got to make sure that things are still growing at the rates that they need to be and keeping that growth rate up and running. The more you grow, the more resources you have. The more talent you have in your community, the more diversity you have in your community as far as talent and backgrounds and everything, gender, race, everything like that, the more resources you have. Cultural differences make a difference. People from different cultures and different backgrounds and different education will bring something new to the table all the time. Okay. You don't want to be like the little gated community of all one ethnic group or income level. That's boring. All the houses are the same. What's the value there? Those people seem to be happy because they're living in their little gated community. But other than you want to be a part of that, what's the value of that community really? How does that community grow? How does that community maintain loyalty? These are problems. I'm a big believer in the more you grow, the more resources you have, and you really need to have that for you. Advocacy. Okay. That's another value that community brings to a project. The more people who are using it, the more people aren't going to just be advocates for it. You know, we all, well, not all of us, I know people who don't, but a lot of us, and hold this up as a visual here, I'm kind of taped down. You know, we've got stickers. You know, I love pulling this thing out on an airplane because people, like, normal people, and I don't mean to disparage, but sometimes I call them muggles, they don't have that going, and they look at it and they're like, what are you? Because I'm kind of an older gentleman and everything like that. I'm pretty like, leave it to beaver kind of guy looking, and they're like, what, are you a hippie? What is this going on here? But this is what we do in community all the time. This goes back to ancient tribal, you know, I'm not a sociologist, but I'm sure it's just some sort of tribe. I'm part of this tribe. I've got a sticker. You know, we've got people in redhead to get the fedora tattoos. I'm like, no, that's not happening. But they do that because it's part of advocacy, and that's a very powerful reason to have a strong community and a project that helps people understand the project. Okay. So if somebody comes up to you and says, I don't understand what this does, the better, you know, the stronger, more vibrant in your community, the easier it is, it's going to be to explain it to people. They're going to have this sense of community and they're hopefully going to help people understand the project better. The other thing that you want to do with advocacy is communicate how useful it is to participants. It's not just enough for me to say that Overt is a virtual data center management platform. I need to be able to, as a community member, communicate that how useful it is to use someone outside of my community who hasn't used it. Okay. How is this going to be useful to you? Okay. And build that up and use community resources to help get that message across. And then this is really nuanced because it seems like it's the same thing. So now I've explained to you how useful Overt is. I really haven't, but we're short on time. But hypothetically, I've explained it to you. Okay. And what it will do for you, now I actually have to tell you how to use it. How do you install it? How do you get these virtual machines from one host to another? It's documentation. Okay. And that's something community also needs to bring too. So these are the three areas of advocacy that a community can do for you and should do for you if you're a project, a software project. And then the benefits of this, and this may seem a little bit familiar, just like on the business side, for the project will have a higher adoption rate if the community is strong. Oh, you know, so and so. My friend over here, he's using Debian. He likes that. He really, really likes that. It's gotten really strong. It's not as hard to install anymore because does anybody remember how hard it was to install Debian? Yeah, I almost shot my computer the first time I did it back in the early 2000s. It was very painful. But that is no longer a thing. Debian is like easy, except maybe gentoo, because I still don't understand that. And that's my fault, not theirs. More project recognition. These parts tie in very, very well. The value of community is much closer to an alignment with business side here. Okay? You get the higher adoption rate. You get more brand project recognition. Project recognition. Sorry. So community versus commercial. The age-old problem that we have. Because they do tend to be at loggerheads sometimes. And we see this a lot. It's the upstream-downstream model. And different companies are going to deal with this in different ways. It is very important, and I'll deliver this lesson from a red hat point of view. And take that as the grain of salt. Because not everybody does it the way we do. But one of the things that we have found that is very, very very important to differentiate between the work that is done in the upstream project versus the work that is done in the downstream project. And how that work is done. Okay? So, give you an example. One of the things I got to peek at my phone here for a second because I just had a brain okay, Slack. Sorry. I was trying to get the name of the app. So everybody heard of Slack as a chatting app and things like this. So actually, this is something that we're actually talking about a little bit at Red Hat. Because a lot of people, especially on the business side to sales side and everything like that, they don't really like IRC. Well, I kind of don't blame them because if you look at IRC from somebody who hasn't been using it forever, it's a really simplified arcane system. Even if you're using something pretty like XChat or something like that, you know, I'm running, I'm hardcore, I'm in IRSSI. So I'm doing command line IRC. But I get that. XChat is very limited. It's just sort of like, hey, how are you? Hey, how are you? And things like that. Slack is more interesting to people at Red Hat. And there's been a movement lately of saying, hey, we really should think about adopting Slack as an internal communication tool. It's like, yeah. And I got Slack on my phone. I use it to talk to some team members usually when we're here, when we're out at conferences, because I can't really get IRC very well like persistently. So it's nice to have Slack as a side channel where I can say, hey, we need to go to In-N-Out Burgers now. Right? Yeah, because we're so sophisticated. You know. But that's what we need it for. So we're using it, it's fine. But the problem that we're having and this fits to the upstream-downstream thing is that if Red Hat were to adopt and start using Slack almost exclusively for chat, then we would see an adoption fall-off very quickly of IRC. And the problem there is if we're running Red Hat, a domain Red Hat Slack.com, right? What happens to the communities? Okay. Because we have, we use IRC predominantly to talk to our community members who do not work for Red Hat. They are not behind our firewall. You know. They're communicating with us on public channels. If we use, if we move to a private channel that's inside our firewall, that's great for us. That's terrible for our communities. So that is a current kind of real-time example of one way you have to make sure that you keep resources dedicated focus, dedicated on the upstream and do it on the upstream first. Okay. One of the, one of the challenges we had again, Overt because I'm familiar with it, one of the challenges that we had over, we still do, is our documentation was terrible. Okay. And what was happening was we have a team at Red Hat that works on the documentation as part of our support structure. So part of the value add that you get if you buy a commercial support for any of our products is you get training, you get support, and you get documentation. Okay. But what was happening was the upstream documentation in Overt was, uh, terrible. Okay. It still kind of is. We're working on it. I swear to God. Okay. But it's bad and then what would happen was the commercial people would basically be writing the documentation product only from scratch. Okay. And it was better and they were delivering it and they're delivering it to their customers. That's not the, our customer. Sorry. That's not the right way to do that. And they know that. Okay. They know that. But then there's a couple of things. One is they say, well, they turn to the upstream and they say, well, you kind of really need to get something better because we're using Overt.org is based on MediaWiki. They were, they're using, you know, DocBook based documentation. So, um, through Publican. MediaWiki does not deal well. Because MediaWiki is a wiki and this is a semantic text language down here in the downstream. These two things do not talk to each other at all. It's, it's, it's really awful and ugly and evil. So they're, first off, they're turning to us and they, you guys need a better website. And we're like, okay. But then we're, but then we're like to them, we're like, we need you guys to actually stop writing for the downstream and start writing for Overt. And do that in the upstream. Work on that first. And then you should, if we've got the right platform for you. Because admittedly we don't now, but we're moving to it. Then hypothetically you should be writing documentation in Overt. And then when it's time to release a commercial version, you just push a button, rebrand everything and say, boom, there's your commercial version. You know. So even companies like Red Hat are not perfect here. So the important thing is two things. Know where the boundaries are between upstream and downstream. Make sure you are dedicating resources to the upstream. Make sure they're separate from the downstream. And really this is personal bias, but I think this is the right way to go. Dedicate those resources more to the upstream, less to the downstream. Let the downstream take care of itself. I think personally for me 75 to 80% of the work should be done in the upstream project. The rest should be done in the downstream as an afterthought where you rebrand everything and you secure everything and you walk orders down and do what you need to do. Another thing that we see in community versus commercial as a way of bridging this gap is the notion of open core. Open core basically says our software is open and you can have the free version, but it's not going to be as full featured as the version that will sell you. We don't do this at Red Hat at all. There are differences between Fedora and Rel, obviously. Those differences are related to the fact that we're trying to stabilize things. We got to use more stable code that is enterprise ready. Fedora is great, it's not enterprise ready. When we give you Rel, we're not handing you Crippleware. We're not saying it's something less than Fedora. We're saying this is more stable than Fedora. Open core these companies will be handing you things that are not as, they're deliberately not as feature rich. If you want these features, you're going to have to pay us money for them. A lot of people look at that and say if I know that going in I'm fine. That's cool. At least they're up front about it. They're not really trying to trick me or anything like that. But the classic problem there is this. Say I'm offering in my software the ability to have, you know, talk to a mobile app. You know. And that's part of the full featured sellable version of the program. And then along comes this really hot young developer real hot shot and she said something along the lines of hey, I know a way we can make this work. I figured this out and we can upload the code. Guarantee you what's going to happen is that the company that runs that project is going to reject that code. Because even though somebody has come along and said I can do this and I can do this much more quickly and we can talk to the mobile app and everything like that, they don't want that to happen because they don't want that in the free software version. Because then what would they sell? You know. That's the classic problem. So what's that developer going to do? She's going to feel devalued. You know. Not going to feel like her work was taken seriously. And worse for the company involved, ironically, she'll modify the code for a competitor who has a more open project. You know. And suddenly now they have that feature. Whoops! Community diversity. And I want to be very, very, very clear here. I support diversity in all forms. Race, gender, religion, whatever. But at this point, the context of diversity is how many people work on your project that work for the company and and then don't work for the company. Okay. And we have stats on this. We have dashboards on all of our the projects that are open source and standards group and Red Hat support. Okay. And I will tell you with absolutely no pride whatsoever that for Overt, again the one that I'm the most familiar with, the last time I looked at the stat, which I think was in November, 80% of the contributors on Overt work for Red Hat. That's not good. That is not diverse. Because that's a problem because that basically means if you don't work for Red Hat and you want to contribute to the project like Overt, you're going to feel like, well why would I even do this because if they don't want to see this feature they're not going to accept it because they have a plan for Overt and they have a plan for Rev and they're going to go with that plan. I will tell you that it's not true, but that's just one guy you don't know me from Adam.  So you need to try to make your community as diverse as you can and get outside people in as much as you can. And that is a very, very, very hard thing for commercial entities to accept because they feel like that is a loss of control. I was talking to somebody from Chef about this last night and he actually brought up an example where because there was because of their governance structure and some things that had happened and I don't remember exactly how this worked, but basically there was a period of time where Chef was in their governance structure was being managed by people who are not employees of Chef. You know? I don't think that lasted very long and I don't think that was like alarming. It just sort of happened and everybody was cool with it and everything was fine and then they had another round of elections later and it kind of shifted back. But think about that for a minute. The level of trust that Chef had and I wish I had more details and make the story more real but just even hearing at a cursive level the level of trust that Chef had for their community to let that happen was amazing. That would be great. I'm sure it was probably scary but wow the fact that the community was that diverse and let them happen is really, really good stuff. So the conflict, we go back and forth with this a lot. Another example I wanted to kind of give you was the age-old argument that we have inside Red Hat which is talking about, you know, our salespeople look at open source as an obstacle. And they don't really have anything against open source. It's just that if I'm going to be selling you rel and we now have direct support of CentOS which is a free version of Rel. Okay. And our salespeople go out and potential customers and the potential customer says I don't really need Rel because I have CentOS and that's the same thing and I know how to use it. Drives our salespeople crazy. Especially in the old days it really drove them crazy because it was like they had no influence over CentOS at all. It was just purely adversarial. Well, now CentOS is part of our company. You know, we have hired some of the key maintainers of that project. How does that work? Why can't we make this thing go away? You know, why can't we stop what they're doing? Well, we don't really want to because that's not how we do this. It's a nuanced approach. Salespeople, and this is where my physics background comes in, so be prepared to go to sleep at any point in this presentation from now on. Salespeople think of this as a sale as they're hitting the basket. Actually, the original metaphor I have was shooting a gun, but I thought, nah, I'll stick with sports. It's still projectile motion. It's pretty simple. You hit a basket, yes, there's skill involved. I'm not an NBA player and I will never be confused for an NBA player. But, you know, intuitively it's pretty clear that after a little bit of practice, most of us can hit some baskets, maybe not consistently well, but there's no real skill, I mean, there's no real deep skill there. You're going to need practice to do it consistently and do it better, but we intuitively, because of the way our brains work and because of spatial relationships, it's not hard to figure out if I throw the ball in a certain way, it's going to get inside the basket. The physics are relatively simple. Okay. And that is a game that commercial entities, not just sales, but commercial entities in general are trying to do. They're trying to hit that basket. In a proprietary software world, that's fairly straightforward. I have software, it has features X, Y, and Z, it costs this much. You want it or not. You know, I'm not a salesperson, so that's really not how it goes, but basically that's it. And, you know, if they make it, boom, they hit the basket.  In open source land, when you have an open source project that is out there in the world with you that you're trying to sell into, so I'm trying to sell cloud forms in a world where there's managed IQ, or I'm trying to sell open... I'm trying to sell SUSA Linux or open SUSA. This is true for everything. Not just Red Hat. Then it becomes much harder. It becomes more nuanced, actually. More challenging. This is pool. This is billiards. This is district of billiards, and this is not even all of the diagrams that I could pull up. This is just how velocities and transfer of energy works when you hit... a cue ball hits a ball and you're trying to hit the side pocket. I don't have the reduction in friction things that you get from rolling it across the felt or making a bangshot, or I don't have the sweet spot physics in there. There's a whole bunch more physics in there. I was like, no, I'm not going to throw that all in. This is one. Because billiards is a more nuanced approach. It's not shooting a basket straight. Now you've got to think about bang shots. Now you've got to think about putting English on the ball. Now you've got to think about all these different things that you have to do to get the objective achieved. Okay. So you have to think about it in a more open and sort of a smarter way. You can't think linear anymore. Think about the value. So for us, and again to fall on back on us, the value of CentOS is not immediately clear to our salespeople. It's an obstacle. Except, yeah, but now you've got people who are using CentOS. They're contributing, they're doing bug fixes for CentOS. Okay. And they're and even if they are saying now I'm never going to buy that could change because they're using and again, I'm not trying to disparage Canonical or Ubuntu or OpenSUSA or any of those others. But let's face it, if they're using CentOS, they're one step closer to using the enterprise system that we're in. You know, and they're not going to jump ship and go over to SUSA. You know, so let's that sounds terrible and pragmatic, but it's true and they're there. You know, but those users are contributing something. The CentOS community because they're involved in bug fixes, because they're involved in feature requests and things like that, that will eventually trickle back all the way upstream to Fedora. Okay. Which is the real upstream for all of these projects. So now you've got a circle going. It's not just upstream to downstream. Now you've got actually a way back up to the upstream. You know, it's nuanced. Okay. So this is sort of where we have to kind of take our commercial companies. This is where we have to lead them. We have to say to them it's not a straightforward linear progression from build a product, sell the product. Now it's like we have to get these communities engaged and we have to make sure they're engaged. Very few of us built a town. Okay. But hypothetically let's say we built a town. We built roads. We built water pipes. We built electricity. We built, you know, we get everything. We got schools. We got the post office. We got town hall. We got town jail. You know, whatever. We built all this infrastructure and say that if you look at your community right now and I'm sure all of us, wherever we're from and whatever nationality would be able to say this is true. That you would be able to say in your community there are a whole bunch of people that just want to live there. Don't bother me. I want to live in my house or my apartment. I'm going to pay my taxes. I expect the police to show up. When I call them I expect the fire department to show up. I expect the water company to fix my waters, etc. Okay. That's how most communities are. I'm just going to be a user of this community. But I guarantee you you all know people in your community who are much more civic minded and they see something and they say, you know what, I really want a dog park here. Or I don't want that factory here. I'm going to sign a petition. I'm going to get people going. They're more civic minded. Okay. They want to change the community. They want to be a part of leading that community and not be politicians necessarily, although that is a way to do it too. But they want to be involved. They want to be active. And we as commercial entities have got to provide an outlet for being involved in that way. Yes, most people will just say I want to just be here, hang out, and be cool. Right? But some people are always going to be wanting to change it. And improve it. And you may not like the direction of those improvements, but it's sort of how it has to go. You don't want to manage a community like this. Okay. You cannot have hierarchical, top-down, you know, rigid management structures and governance. You can do that on the technical side for, you know, maintaining and approving patches. Okay. Yeah, because sometimes some, it's always going to be somebody who decides. I'm not talking about patch maintenance and technical stuff. I'm talking about governance. You can do that. Even in the Linux community, which is regarded as a benevolent dictatorship, people have voices. People can be heard. You can change Linus Torvald's mind. I ain't saying it's easy, but he's open to it because he's smart. He, you know, he knows, he knows a lot about Linux and he has very set ideas about some things, but I also understand that he's... I'm seeing changes in mind. You can do it. Okay. So commercial entities get really over-controlling sometimes. Don't be this person. You want to inspire. Although, please don't do this. Because this is... I saw this and I was like, no, this is just too happy, you know, whatever. You know, if I... this is team-building and it scares me, but it's still true. It's still true to your community because the difference is you build a community with inspiration and you're going to inspire people to build a community like this. This is not uniform. This is not necessarily pretty, but this is a community that works. Okay? If you build a community through management and strict controls, this is what you get. You get Disneyland. Disneyland is the most managed community of people on the planet. Epcot Center, very few people know this. Epcot Center was originally designed to actually be a town. It was the most planned community in the world. And it would have all these cool future features. And yeah, it would have an amusement park in the middle of it to sort of kind of showcase these things and generate some revenue. You know, Disney is all about building the strongest, you know, the most overly managed community as possible. And those who are familiar with Disney know that there's not a lot of freedom there. Yeah, there's a cool mouth, but that's all you got. So governance is key. The key to the best value and delivering value for your business and making sure that your community growth is not a grain on your bottom line just to let it go. You know, it's the line from the song. If you love something, set it free. Okay, and that will work. And that sounds cliche and corny, but that is definitely the most true thing you will have about community in the business world. And with that, I believe I've rambled on quite long enough and I have a few minutes for questions. So if everybody's awake, ask Mr. Wally. I'll repeat your question. Right. Okay. And that is value. And I'm not trying to argue that point. How is that different from loyalty that I was talking about before? Or I'm not sure I understand the nuance. Okay. I believe and so just to repeat it for the camera in case it didn't come through, I'm just talking about how inertia is part of community too and stickiness and people are not the unwillingness to change is a factor. And actually, yeah, now I get that because I live in South Indiana where it's ridiculously cold in the winter and I'm on the wrong side of Lake Michigan and I get dumped with beets of snow. Beat, not inches, beat of snow usually every winter. And yet, a same person will move. I would live here. This is really nice here by the way. Those of you who are local but Southern California so I'm rocking it out. Why do I not move? Because if I understand Stephen's point correctly, I have inertia. It's home. And I'm familiar with it. I'm going to stay there until I win the Powerball and then I'm out of here. So we're out of there. Any other questions or comments? And comments are very welcome because this is sort of a we're building this presentation. Okay. Okay, that's a great question. And repeating the question a lot of what I've said has applied to businesses that are directly involved with open source projects like this in building communities. The question was can that also apply to other businesses who might be part of such communities and how they relate and what's the value to them to interact with communities? I think that people on the outside businesses on the outside will get the same kind of value if not more being a part of a community even if they're not directly involved in it. Okay. Because you as a user you get a lot of value being part of community. You get the brand that being part of a tribe and everything like that. Whatever you want to do and I think outside businesses will get the same value if not more. If I'm a small business and I'm running MySQL as a database database server or something like that or if I'm running an email server or whatever like that it's awesome if I can be a part of a community and just ask for help and not pay anybody for it. It might not be the best help it might not be timely if I pay somebody to help me I want an answer in an hour because I got to go but if I've been part of this community as a business entity and they know I'm part of it and they're going to be more willing to help me because I'm just not coming in and saying hey I need help if I've been part of that then they're going to answer me faster because yeah this small business they've hosted our meetings or something like that. There's a lot of give and take with that kind of thing and yeah you can call it being favorite or whatever but there's a lot of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours so that's one benefit I can think of off the top of my head if you are a business participating in a community like that and you use that software you know if you're active and people know you're active they're going to help you a lot faster that's human nature kind of out of time one more question real quick right exactly and it gets back into that argument and that's a very straightforward Machiavellian argument and I'm sure there's a more nuanced way of saying it but I think yeah I think that in for penny in for a pound is a valid way of doing this well thank you all for your comments and questions and your attendance today I appreciate it go eat


Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Of course, my name is Bryce. This is just going to be a quick little channel update and challenge update for you guys because you guys we have less than 10 days left of this 60-day shadow work challenge. Well done. If you are doing the shadow work challenge for 60 days, 60 days is such a long time and I applaud you. Like that is really, really, really hard work and you guys are so brave and you have so much courage to be able to put yourself in a position of working on yourself and kudos to you. I hope that you all had had a really good experience with this shadow work challenge. With that being said, the first announcement I'm going to go ahead and make regarding the shadow work challenge is that I would love to do a big round table with some of our participants, some of you guys that are doing the shadow work challenge if you want to. You don't have to do this. But if you are somebody that wants to come on my channel on Esoteric Atlanta and film a round table talking about everything you've learned about yourself, all your ups and your downs, your highs and your lows throughout the 60 days, then please email me at shadowworkchallenge at gmail.com and please put in the subject line round table. I'll put that information down in the description box below. But if you are interested in being filmed and telling your story, then just let me know. Email me at shadowworkchallenge at gmail.com again subject line round table. Before we get back into it because we are going to look at the upcoming few days of the 60 day shadow work challenge, I just want to make some quick announcements regarding this upcoming week. So Monday, March 12th, I believe that's Monday's date. Let me just double check here. Yep. No, sorry the 13th today is the 12th. So Monday, March 13th. Good thing I checked the date there. I will be on Aquarius Rising Africa like always. I always am on Aquarius Rising Africa on Monday mornings. However, this Monday it will be back an hour. During the wintertime, I'm on a nine o'clock, but during the spring and summer time I am on at 10 o'clock. This is obviously because of time change. So we are going through our day like savings where we're jumping forward an hour now. So for the next few months, I will be on Aquarius Rising Africa live at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. This Monday we will be finishing up the fourth tablet of Thoth's Emerald Tablets and the next Monday next week we will get into the fifth tablet. With that being said, we already have read through the fourth tablet on my channel. So this Monday morning on my channel will be our part two of our Organic Portals episode with our mysterious guest who hopefully will be doing some more shows with me and with Catherine Edwards. Again, the reason why this guest is keeping himself anonymous is because he's a pretty big person here in Atlanta, Georgia. He owns some businesses here in Atlanta, Georgia, and of course this stuff is very controversial. So for his safety and for the best interest of his business and his employees, it's best that we keep him anonymous. So I know you guys understand that. Also, thank you so much to all of the positive response that I've received from the ASEA sponsorship. I am like in love with this product. I am going to be finishing up. I've already filmed my blog, my week blog of my first week on ASEA, and I'm going to be editing that and finishing that up this week for you guys. I can't wait to share with you on the blog all the effects that I have noticed in my life with ASEA. The ASEA is very person-specific and so it blows my mind that the product knew what to do to help me, just as it knows what to do to help other people. I just, I'm overwhelmed at everybody who's left comments about what the ASEA has done for them. I am just, that just makes my heart so happy. It's the, it's stuff like this that like really gives me hope in a new tomorrow because the human body is amazing and the fact that this product is there to help your human body recalibrate and heal itself because the body wants to heal itself. That's, that's the body's job is to heal itself. But with all the toxins that we go through with everything we're hit with on this gangster planet Earth, it sometimes gets very hard for the body to keep up that momentum. And so I am so grateful to this product. I'm so grateful to Catherine Edwards. She had been trying to get me to try this product for a while, bless her heart. And I just, it took me a while to be like, okay, let's try this. And I'm so grateful to the company for allowing me to be able to make a living now doing YouTube so that I can relax more about finances. I don't put any of my work behind a paywall. I don't judge those who do, but I don't do that. I don't put any of my work behind a paywall. I don't make really anything doing you. I love my patrons and my producers so much. My patrons and my producers are the absolute real superstars of this channel. And you guys should really be thinking them because they're the reason why I have still been able to maintain a channel all these years without really making money. So so my patrons and producers mean the world to me. If you would like to join via patron our producer, that information is also in the in the description box below. You don't have to, but I am so grateful. So, so, so grateful to all of my patrons and producers when all of this is over. I hope I hope one day we can all have a big old party together whenever, whenever that day comes, but I'm so grateful to them. But with the ACA, that's really helping me to like make ends meet so that I can relax a little bit about living life and I can focus more on making more content and doing more research. And so I appreciate that so much. And I'm so happy that it's a product that is in integrity, that the product itself has so much integrity. Again, if you want to learn more about the product, the number that's in the description box below takes you directly to Jay, who is from Spiritually Raw. He is, he has been with, he's been doing ACA for a really long time. And so he understands more about the product and the business of ACA than I do. And so that's so I'm so grateful that he is able to filter that for you guys because he is a wealth of information. And so if you're interested in trying the product or if you want to be part of the business of ACA, just text Jay, text Bryce Info to that number. If you don't hear back right away, text again or just make sure you have the right number and Jay will get back to you and he will help you figure out what is best for you, whether that is doing the liquid or just the gel or whether that or what if you want to do a business, whether that's something that that you might be interested in. It's up to you and Jay will help you figure that out for yourself. I am just so grateful for both Jay and Hillis and Catherine Edwards and Danielle and the whole team at ACA because I they're such nice people and they're so incredibly helpful to go above and beyond. So if that's something you're interested in, please, please take advantage of talking to Jay about it because this is the way of the future. You know, there's abundance in everything. There's abundance out there for your health. There's abundance out there for your spirituality. There's an abundance out there for your finances. It's all there for you for the taking. And that's what I really like about this company is it's an idea of making sure every human being is OK, not just a few people, but every human being. And so please don't hesitate to to reach out to Jay if that's something that you're interested in. All righty here. Let's go ahead and now look at the upcoming shadow work challenge because we have some fasting coming up. So let's go ahead and look at tomorrow, which is day 52, Monday, March 13th, new addition to the challenge. Since you're at the halfway mark, make up your bed every morning. Your last meal should be between five and seven p.m. No snacking after seven p.m. as this allows you to digest a system to rest. So your blood has a chance to cleanse and heal other organs, such as your skin. All right, warm up for both beginners and experienced. Exercise selection for everyone. Please pick from the following either 20 minutes beginning ashtanga with a strong nurse, 60 minute on you. So our class with Cindy all levels.  So our all levels with Cindy. So again, you don't have to do all of these. You can pick one. So so as as we're getting deeper into the almost finishing up the 60 days, you're given more flexibility. I'm hoping that after 52 days, you have more more confidence in picking what exercise works for you or which one your body needs at the moment that you have more of a autonomy when it comes to your body during your morning shower. Again, try to make the last five minutes of your shower cold to help with inflammation and blood flow, meditation, healing, childhood trauma with morning, which Saturday of this week, the 11th. You actually worked on childhood trauma. You did a video with morning from Aquarius Rising Africa. You also were able to look into Kwan Yen, which is absolutely one of my favorite avatars key codes from the Sophia code. And so you got to kind of explore that again. All right. So let's go on to Tuesday or excuse me, let's stay with Monday for a little bit. Food journaling, as always. And then over the next couple of days, you will be preparing for a potential three day fast or three day kitschery cleanse. So if your vata like me, a kitschery cleanse is probably going to be better for you than a fast, please know that this is optional. And if you struggle with this disordered eating and decide to do the fast, make sure you're doing the fast the right reason. If you're doing the fast, your exercise will be limited due to energy. If you are not doing the fast or the cleanse, you will have the higher impact options for exercise. Please do not use this time to abuse yourself or overdo it. Take these next couple of days to mentally prepare for whatever it is that you decide to do. Please note that is not advised that you eat that you eat a lot before the fast starts, maybe start cutting back a little bit in these next few days to repair your mind and your body. Here is a link with information on kitschery cleanses. Again, this is totally optional. You don't have to do the cleanse or the fast. You can just continue doing what you're doing. And I have options. You'll see with the exercise. I do have options for people who are not fasting. So it's totally up to you. This is not this is an experience. You get to decide what your experience is going to be with this. Shanti from Aquarius Rising Africa will be walking you through the fast. If you decide to do it, if you need to contact Shanti directly, her contact is Aquarius Rising 001 at gmail.com or you can visit her website. Bryce and Shanti discuss fasting. Here's a video you can watch preparing for your fast. It's equally as important to prepare your body for fasting. Before embarking on this water fast, please start gently cleansing your body two days before we begin. Avoid meats and heavy processed food, alcohol, too much sugar and caffeine. If you aren't already, start drinking two to three liters of water a day. Eat soups, smoothies, fruits in the morning and lots of veggies. Now, this is exactly this site. Shanti wrote this. So here's from Shanti. Fasting is not about losing weight or having a quick crash diet to shed those unwanted kilos or pounds. When done with the right intention and belief, it has huge spiritual benefits. It clears the mind and body of earthly attachments and draws us closer to the divine. It certainly requires self control and discipline as we deny ourselves the pleasures of indulging in many delicious and tasty diversions, something we often use to distract ourselves from what's really happening within. It doesn't only have to be about food, it can also be from social media, technology, sex, smoking, caffeine, relationships or anything that you feel could be hampering your spiritual awareness and growth. The intention of fasting is to remove the physical trappings in your world and intensely concentrate on God. It's about aligning yourself with God's will and thereby tapping into your magnificence that very often hides within the layers and way beyond. Sir Lauren's Vanderpost, a well-renowned South African authors, spent many years living with the Bushman and the Kalahari. He had this to say, the Bushman and the Kalahari talk about two hungers, the Great Hunger and the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly and the Great Hunger. The greatest hunger of them all is the hunger for meaning. There is ultimately one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But a far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning because meaning transfigures all. Once you are doing what has meaning for you, it is irrelevant whether you are happy or unhappy. You are content. You are not alone in your spirit. You belong. And I love that because that's a lot of what the yoga teaching is about, too. Like happiness and unhappiness come from the Zach. They're two sides of the same coin. They're your perception of events. So happiness and unhappiness is kind of like base level. We want to go deeper than that. Like what is meaning? Things to consider before you fast. You'll be prompted to journal these questions tomorrow, but for today, just contemplate to begin your fast. It's important to have a purpose or intent. What would you like to achieve? Break an addiction, find deeper meaning and purpose for your life and a relationship, start a healthier way of living. Whatever it is, be clear on your intention and have that as your focus. Please note that I said focus and not obsession. Don't have a rigid goal for the outcome in mind because God works in very mysterious ways. So rather focus on what every moment of your fast is bringing you. Yet be specific. Sometimes you can see the full result in a week or a month. The gifts of the journey itself are what we can most benefit from. You will get hungry, no denying that. But it's during these times, remember that words of the Bushman. What great hunger is calling you from beyond the little hunger of the belly. What brings you meaning? Who are you really beyond the layers? Meditate, pray, be silent, journal, observe your emotions and reactions as if under a microscope at this time. What triggers you? How do you feel when you need to stop yourself from eating? What mental dialogue do you have to go on going on in your head? Take note of every little detail. Use your journal at this time like you've never used it before. Remember, the objective is not to judge yourself. But if you find yourself being judged to yourself and others, it's good to notice that, too. Through my fasting experience over time and those who have fasted with me, I have found a general pattern that tends to happen with people. I'll give you some common experience shares, although I'm pretty sure use yours may be truly unique to you for today's journaling. Number one, how are you feeling about all the childhood trauma? Have you made any self-realizations about your life as an adult and the cause and effect of childhood trauma from your childhood to adulthood? Have you struggled with body image or eating disorder? And I really want you guys to focus on this. This is why we we tied childhood trauma in with fasting. Because again, if you are still in that karmic loop of having some body image issues like eating disorders, I want you to really consider maybe not fasting yet. Give yourself time to heal from that before tackling a bigger obstacle. But as always, that is totally up to you. We briefly spoke about body image earlier in this challenge.  How has eating taught you to be as child? What did your parents teach you in regards to your relationship with food? Being totally honest with yourself, what is your relationship with food? Do you use food as a punishment reward system or to nurture your body? Do you ever have you ever used food as a way to abuse yourself or as a way to seek control? Being totally honest with yourself. Is fasting or doing a cleanse healthy for you at this moment? If you were to fast, what would you want? I think that's a typo there. What would you want to learn from it? If you decide that fasting isn't for you at this moment? Why? And are you skipping this? Why? And are you OK with skipping this part of the challenge?  We've been doing this the whole channel or the whole challenge rather and turn off all electronics and go to bed before 10 p.m. Because that's the pit of time. All right, Tuesday, day 53, March 14th. Again, you're making your bed up. You're not snacking after 7 p.m. Let's see. So warm up for the beginners and advance for both beginners and experienced challengers. Start to try to try to start your exercise program by doing five Surya Namaskar A and three Surya Namaskar B unless you are involved in Shanti's Sunside Education Challenge as well. Here's myself doing five A and three B exercise for everyone. Today, your warm up has been provided, but the exercise is up to you. Take a moment to reflect on all you've learned during this journey and use your knowledge to now pick your workout. You can pick from everything provided in this challenge or do a class or workout that is not in this challenge that you feel the desire to try. Trust yourself and do it today. If you're planning on starting the fast tomorrow, be mindful. You might want to only do 20 minutes of shangha or you might want to do a more high impact exercise like kickboxing since your exercise during the fast will be at a minimum. If you're not doing the fast or the cleanse, proceed as you normally would using the knowledge you have acquired during this challenge to pick to pick the work up that's best for you on this day during your morning shower. Again, cold, cold water for the last five minutes. Same meditation of a childhood trauma with morning. Same food journaling, same preparation for the cleanse or the kid or the fasting or the kitschery cleanse. And then the same, same reference back from yesterday to really give you some some time to really think about this huge undertaking if you're going to do it. OK. Journal to ask from Shanti what you reviewed from yesterday to begin your fast. It's important to have a purpose or intent. Would you what would you like to achieve break an addiction? Find deeper meaning and purpose for your life and a relationship. Start a healthier way of living, whatever it is, be clear on your intention and have that as your focus. Please note that I said focus again, not obsession. You don't have to be rigid with your goals. So give given the points that Shanti has made. What is your intention doing this fast? So really be clear. I think if you're really clear with your intentions, very honest with yourself or those of you that do have disordered relationships with food, you'll be able to realize in writing this down, being really honest with what your intentions are, if if if this is something that you need to do or not. So if your intentions are to feed into unhealthy habits of starvation for starvation, like a disordered eating, then maybe again, just writing it out, you'll realize that spiritually for you now is not the time to start. But maybe that's a wound you need to heal first, right? Totally everybody is going to be different, though. OK. God works in very mysterious ways. We read that. All right. So for those not fasting, even though you are opting out of the fast, what can you learn about the big hunger and the little hunger? If you had disordered eating, how have you addressed this in your life? Have you ever sought treatment for an eating disorder? If so, how did it go? If not, why? If you don't have disordered eating, but off to fast, why is that off not to fast? Why is fasting not good for you at this time? No, there is no wronger wrong answer here. There's no if you don't if you just don't want to fast, that's fine, too. But it's time for self exploration, which you consider fasting at a later time when you're mentally prepared for it. And if you guys noticed for a while now in the challenge, we've I've been having you have your last meal between five and seven p.m. and not snack after seven p.m. A lot of that is for many people to see when they are mindlessly eating.  When you get into the evening hours and you're at home relaxing, watching TV all of a sudden, the mind is now able to kind of pull up problems your past depressions, anxieties, all that kind of because the brain's a problem solver, right? And so sometimes people then will go mindlessly eat to try to distract from maybe some uncomfortable feelings that had been suppressed all day. And so by taking away the stimulants, taking away the the the distraction when you feel those emotions come up at night, you could take to your journal and work through them. And also from a very physical perspective, as we've said, if you cut your eating off earlier in the evening, not stop snacking after seven p.m., you're giving your digestive system a chance to rest. And because your digestive system is resting, blood can now go to other organs and help heal other organs, mainly your skin. So people who don't eat after like seven o'clock at night tend to look better, tend to look healthier. It's because the blood, their blood has been able to heal their organs and their skin and help them rest during the night versus using all the blood in the digestive system to digest the snacking in the food, if that makes sense. So so just just know that. Just understand that the power is within you to course correct and change these patterns. So Wednesday, March 15th, day 54, day this is the first day of the cleanse are fast. All right. So again, you're going to have different options of exercises for people fasting.  That's it. That's it. Nothing more than 15 minutes. All right. Or not exercising at all. I would suggest some stretching, some some unsalutations again to get the body detoxing, to get the blood flowing. But again, that's up to you. All right. For people who are not fasting, you're going to either be doing a 30 minute kickboxing or 45 minute kickboxing meditation. You get to pick all meditation or sample healing. Day one, please refer back to this as you go through day two and three from Shanti water menu for all three day remains the same. So you have how to create the actual cleansing, the detoxing of this right here. Day one through three spiritual menu. All right. So you can I'm not going to read through all of this because if you are doing this, then you absolutely this was sent to you in the 60 day challenge. So you can refer back to your template. All right. For Monday, midday, sorry. And then evening reflection. So she kind of helps you through it, right? Night one for faster is what to expect.  It gets to go and pull out toxins from other organs. So that's why you're going to fill the headache and the nausea is because your body is actually going to start detox, right? So journal freestyle with prompts from Shanti. Of course, you're still filling a lot of these emotions and more potentially, but it's more important to remind yourself that the emotions that the emotion surfacing are asking to be healed. So rather than beat them down again or take them out on someone else, make the time to nurture yourself. Take a bath with epsom salts or essential oils every night of your fast. Listen to calming music, take a walk and most importantly, journal, not typing, writing with a pen and a paper, words, have energy and the letters all hold vibrations that flow through you as you write. Don't be shy to write and express your deepest feelings in your journal. You can always burn the pages afterwards if you like, but writing is one of the most powerful forms of healing. Writing letters to people you have and never have to give them to the person are good ways of releasing pent up emotions. This could be an angry, sad, happier, grateful letter. Often we did find it difficult to express ourselves to others verbally. Sometimes we didn't get the opportunity. Sometimes we were to stubborn, whatever the reason it's irrelevant. Write the letters and express yourself in truth. See what happens then, make sure you get to bed early. Latest 10 p.m. on the nights, you fast sleep is a beautiful way of restoring your soul. These are my journaling prompts. For those not fasting, you did kickboxing again today. This is high energy, I braced. Pick this intentionally for the non-fasters while some of your co-challengers were taking it a little bit easy today for their exercise, you pushed it. How did this high intensity of the workout help you, the non-faster, get emotions out? How did the kickboxing, which brings your bodies to the brink physically, help you work through the big hunger and the little hunger? For those not fasting, how is this choice affecting you? Are you comfortable with your decisions? For those not fasting, have you experienced detoxing symptoms during this challenge? How have you worked through them? All right, so I think I'm gonna stop it there because that's a lot for this update for this video. And join us again on Monday tomorrow with the prayers rising Africa. I'm sure that we will be talking about this before we go into the Emerald Tablets as well because Shanti is the one that's heading up the fast. Of course, we'll be talking about the fasting in the Signal Group, but Shanti also has her own Signal Group as well. So please make sure that you join those. If you have the template from the 60 Day Challenge, the link to the Signal Group is in that template. I will also place that down in the description box below for Shanti's links, you will have to ask her or you can ask in the Signal Group, in the Esoteric Atlanta Support Group Signal Group to get the link from Shanti. All right, you guys, I hope you're doing really, really well. Happy March, happy Spring, and yeah, I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye.


Here we go y'all it is the morning of first hunt with the new rifle I cannot wait to get this thing just lined up on something I don't I don't even know but I am gonna be buck hunting and I'm looking like for just something old big trophy walks out it's old I'm gonna shoot it if there's a selective harvest deer that's that's big it's old I'm gonna shoot it I just I don't know I want to shoot something really mature this year we got a southwest wind this morning so I'm gonna go sit a spot where I've a shot deer in the past with my bow there's a bow stand and a tree but there's also a box blind it's just unseasonably warm and a lot of our stands are set up from north winds so this is one of the few spots I can go and they won't sniff me out try to get my dad I'm one of these these big old girthy deer and the wind just wasn't good where I wanted to sit we had a great sit at another place seen a lot of bucks to these two really old ones I've got two old sevens and a really old eight point that I'm looking at going after and I think they travel from where I really want to sit which doesn't have good wind and this spot that we're gonna go sit this morning I think they kind of go back and forth we'll see we may not get a look at the right one but this place we always get to look at deer so it's always fun sun's coming up in 45 minutes let's go see if we can get something in the crosshairs while Mesa it is hard to see even 50 yards but as I was coming in I was going to corn there was already two or I'm assuming he was chasing her I see these cows starting to lay down it's coming out but dear probably going to late for the morning I haven't seen any any more passer-throughs this has been one of my longest morning sits out here it was because of the fog hindsight hindsight should have shot the gold I was just waiting for the bigger one that was with him to that was at the feeder early this morning that we just couldn't see couldn't make out my gut tells me it was probably that giant eight-point but I couldn't see enough to identify him certainly not enough to put a crosshairs on him so so it goes sometimes I'm gonna head back in and get some breakfast my stomach is fat is just I mean he has mega rutting right here I'm gonna try to do a stalk on me it's like he doesn't know what he might go over this fence but I mean it's a great call and he's like he's on a dough he's ready to fight I can just chase this guy I just watched that that deer get on the dough he was looking for and he ran off but man that's four deer that I could have shot today if I wasn't filming that's that's part of the enjoyment for me is getting it all on camera it's hard you know I'm doing it by myself so I have to set set it up and I get the shot and it just you know doesn't make any sense if all of a sudden we're just looking at a deer on the ground and for me personally I like I like the challenge so one of these days I'm gonna go hunting and you guys won't see it but not anytime soon I always try to capture it all but yeah a rutting a rutting buck right there perfect call it was like 300 yards could have easily made it with that gun but he got on that dough and he go heck of a morning y'all I cannot believe how foggy it was and it was weird to see the rut start to kick in randomly I hadn't seen that in the last few days and then boom they were just getting in the zone you know unfortunately I've got a I gotta head home I think what I'm gonna do is come back here with my dad again I'm just man I would much rather him get a trophy buck than me you know I'm down for shooting these coals like I should have shot this morning we just don't have that many days left in the season and there just hasn't been that many deer down out here and there's just so many so many call bucks just more mouths on the property just eaten eating up and taking up resources and all that so selective harvesting we need to do some of that for sure I've been sitting here just plinking with the new rifle it is awesome I cannot wait to stretch this thing out and then take my first animal with it at the very least I'm gonna set up a long-range corn pile and try to get some hogs or something like that just because that's what this thing is really capable to get out there for 500 600 yard shots so the really ironic thing is I took a long range rifle out there and couldn't see more than 50 yards and I needed like a pistol or a bow I literally had a deer with I could reach out the window and scratch his ear it was it was awesome anytime you can get that close to deer it's amazing I like to watch him I like to film him and it's part of the fun for me and sometimes that means your shot opportunity is gone but you know I get to rewatch these things you guys get to watch it all so it's all part of the fun thank you guys for tuning in to an extra foggy episode always smash that like button for greatness in the outdoors I will see you guys


Oh well hello Friday, how are ya? Doyle, you coming with me? Come on buddy, let's go. It's always such a struggle for him to get out of the bed and leave, leave the room. I don't leave the door open anymore because a while ago, not anytime recently, when I was working and going into the office so like the beginning of the year, he decided that that was going to be his poop room. So we don't leave that door open anymore in the house and I have like something coming in on my nose.  I don't know what it is but my, the tip of my nose is just red today so it doesn't hurt or anything so I don't know. Maybe I got a bug bite? I have no idea. It doesn't feel like you know like a pimple coming through but you just never know. You never know. I'm stressed so you never really know. Oh I wanted to show you guys something. Hold on. My kitchen faucet came in. I got it on amazon. It was actually quite inexpensive and this is what it is. It is the, look it it's the wee wee. Anyway I am like three years old. This is the faucet. I am going to have them install it without the plate and yeah that's what it looks like. Well it's right here. That's what it looks like and it's got like a pull down. So hard to get into. It's got like a pull down lever and like snaps back pretty nicely. I actually watched like a couple videos about it and it's got the like little thingamajiggy. Yeah so I wanted to show it to you guys. I know the plastic is still on here but this is my cabinet hardware and you see how this has like a little bit of like ridging to it like right around here and then also it has like the same thing over here and right there. I just thought that it kind of went well with like this. You know what I mean? I mean I knew it was going to be like a stainless because they don't really make you know galvanized looking faucets or at least they don't make galvanized looking faucets in my price range. So um yeah it was under a hundred buck. It's got pretty good reviews. So I think I have everything I need. I already hired my plumber. I think I told you guys that. I hired my plumber already and um got an email from the granite company today wanting me to pay part of my bill and I said okay well things aren't finalized yet because I haven't even been there to look at countertops for the bathroom yet. So I don't really want to pay for something that I may or may not get. I mean I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get one but you know just in case. So anyway just emailed him back and just said like hey by the way um I haven't even been there yet to look at those. So how about we do that for Wednesday um and then we can just like I can write him a check or give him my debit card or whatever. So in a hurry we can do that but I'm actually on my way to grandma's house. Doyle's grandma's house and I'm gonna go over there. I need to help her move her desk in her second bedroom. They are getting a new bed in there and the bed should be well I think the bed was supposed to be coming tomorrow and now it's coming on Tuesday I think. Anyway but just want to get the um new placement of the desk that's already existing in the room and I'm sure some of you guys are probably like Emily your dad lives there too. Why doesn't he help? Let me tell you my dad is not a helper of the things. My dad likes to supervise and annoy. That is what he does. Uh the day I moved out here which three years ago the day I moved into this place I told him if he was going to be rude and condescending that he should leave and I actually forced him to leave. Not in a bad way. He already knew the rules. We've had this conversation for the last what how old was I 37 years or 38 years at the time. This is nothing new. It was nothing new. There's no big blow up. It was just like you just go. You just go somewhere else. You're not helping. Goodbye. Your comments are not helpful. Goodbye because he always likes to tell you how you're doing it wrong and what he would do but he doesn't want to do it. So it's just like it's under my skin Nick it's real annoying. I'm sure y'all have people like that in your life too you know I'm fine. So anyway um yeah so that's that. You guys are learning like way too much about me today. That's only like a couple minutes in. Oh well put the life on the internet. Why the heck not?  So I will see you guys when I see the favorite mama. So I'll see you in a little bit. Bye. Hi there. Favorite mama's here. We are in the guest room slash office of her place and we made a space. Tada. This is gonna be a bed's gonna be there. All size bed. Yep. So the favorite son will be able to sleep on here and his feet will go off the bed. So yeah it'll work out good. Right and then we moved this office setup from this wall that was over here and then moved this guy over here. Not sure if this is staying. I think it's gonna stay. Yeah. We'll have to see when the bed comes in. But um yeah she got this desk at Ikea a few years ago so working out good. It was actually pretty I don't know. I think it was kind of easy to move. So the compromise the compromise on this is this door goes into the second bathroom. Yep. So just from this room there's no access. What? Sorry. You can open it but you gotta jump the desk. So now you gotta do you gotta go like this and you gotta go oh look there's the bathroom. So I mean you know it's like three more steps in someone's life. Yeah. I don't know. But Phil said he's okay with it. So that was the that was the final word. Yep. So a lot. Yeah. So that's the compromise. Yeah. So this is gonna work. So yeah my desk space plus we'll have this separately. Exactly. So she's all set up over here just kind of dusting things off and figuring out how to you know configure on a different plane over here and look then you can she can look outside at the pretty little plants and stuff. Aww so nice. I showed my pretty little prints here. Oh yeah. These are like some prints that my brother gave me and I just love them. They're just Canadian geese and they just look so lovely in this room. They do. I really like them a lot. And they kind of go with the bedding that we got a while ago. Which is stuff. Which is like super stuffed in here. Stuffed in here. But it's this like twal twile I don't know how to say it print. From where do we get it? Ikea. We got it in Ikea. So we did kind of gray. Gray and white. Gray color paint and white and it's just super easy. So we're just gonna use all the same bedding in here. Yeah. And then um yeah so. Oh and we've got oh we've got fireworks and sparklers for the grandson. So don't recommend. Yeah I know. Yeah that was the father purchase. Yeah that was I just found that out and I was like I want nothing to do with that.  We need supervision on that. You know what my dad's like 70 something. He's 70? Yeah he's 72. He's gonna be 73 in a couple of days.  Like let's be real.  Why?  Oh my gosh. Anyway. Anyway so we're here. We're hanging out and um I don't know. I'll check in when more things start to happen. I don't know. You got anything fun to add? Um no. No I don't think so. Yeah that's it's kind of boring.  We're a boring bunch. Not much happening. We're not interesting at all. Okay bye. Well hey more exciting things are happening. So now I'm picking up the camera. Mom's driving. Well we're not we're not actually driving yet but we've decided that we're done with the crap food because everything around here well not everything. Majority stuff around here is like fast food that's open. Minnesota is now finally opening up a little bit for other services but um Applebee's has car aside to go. So we got some Applebee's um mom got steak and shrimp. I got salmon and dad got some baby back ribs. So we're going with that a little bit of a healthier option than like fries in a shake or whatever. So um so yeah that's what we're gonna go do. So we're gonna do the like curbside pickup. Um so we should be good to go there.  Yeah we get road constructions. Yeah we do we do have road construction and people either go like really fast on this road or they go like so slow like molasses. It's like one of the other. There's no in between. No in between. So anyway all right we're gonna go but I'm gonna show you the food when we get back because we're gonna take it back and we might give dad this food. We don't we don't know. We haven't hopefully decided if he deserves it. He said he was working all day and he's been on the road all day so he didn't want to go get the food. So he went to visit his brother and then they went shopping.   Surprise. They'll probably be napping by the time we get back. So he has a good time with his brother. He does. He does. It's a good time for him to get out of the house. Anyways okay see you in a bit. All right so I got some smush stuff. It kind of moved a little bit. I got some salmon, garlic mash and broccoli because you got to save the trees. All right we got a salad and dad got some ribs and some onion rings and mom got a shrimp and steak but with no seasoning because you know she can't she can't handle it. Can't handle pepper. Look at that. Oh man. It's gonna be so good. All right but anyway I'm gonna eat all that. I am home. So is Doyle. Doyle's always here. It's like he never leaves. Um yeah so on my way home actually I started my car and I have an automatic start on my car because Minnesota you know and my dash had my check engine light on and it also had like the car with like the little slippy things highlighted and then a light that says vsc off and it was flashing. So I was like okay I'm gonna do you look at my user manual. So I tried to troubleshoot it didn't happen and then it says if the vsc off indicator light flashes which it is it says there's a malfunction in the track trac and vsc systems contact your Toyota dealer and have your Toyota inspected. Yay oh my gosh you know then it's just something I need right now is to go to the Toyota dealership so I called my Toyota dealership. They are closed because it's 8 30 but I have their number now saved in my phone and I am going to call them as soon as I can tomorrow morning. So wish me luck. I hope it's just an easy fix. I don't want to go into the dealership you guys. I don't want to do that but I feel like I'm going to have to do that tomorrow. My day of sleeping in and not doing too much tomorrow is now going to be ruined by my vehicle. So I'll take you guys along. I'll let you know. I don't even know if I can even get into an appointment at this point. I don't know. I don't know. I have no clue. So anyway I'm going to call it quits here. I'm going to take Doyle out to go to the bathroom. I'm going to grab some water and I'm going to try to edit this tonight. Last night I couldn't get it uploaded for you guys because my internet was so flipping slow. I don't know what was going on but clearly someone was having some sort of internet party or something. I have no idea. So anywho. Well I'm going to jet. Thank you guys for hanging out with me today. I hope you enjoyed seeing the favorite mama for a little bit. And yeah that's it. I'm going to see you guys tomorrow. Wish me luck on the whole car thing. Bye guys. Okay I just I know that I just closed up the vlog but I just got upstairs and I'm like okay well I'm going to go on the website and see if I can schedule an appointment. The next appointment available Thursday June 18th. Keep in mind it's June 5th. I don't know. I'm hoping that everything's okay until the 18th. I don't know if I should be driving that way. I don't know. I'm going to call them in the morning anyways just to double check that I can drive my vehicle until then and that they advise that. I don't know. Also I have a safety recall that's been sitting on my refrigerator for like a month. It's just it's airbags so I mean either way I was just going to wait until I had to go back into the dealership to get that fixed because it's like one of the free recalls because they found out clearly something was wrong with it. So anyway I put in that I wanted to get that done too so maybe that's the problem? I don't know. I'm saving the appointment. I'm going to put it in my planner for the 18th but I will call them tomorrow to see but that just seems like excessive that it's that long for an appointment. I don't know. I don't know. Okay anyway I'm going to close out the vlog. I will see you guys tomorrow. Bye! Well folks it's time to kick it old Let's go.