Techstrong Gang – April 4, 2025

Hey everyone. What's a neo neis? It could be Europe's Declaration of Independence.

You're watching Techron Gang. Hey everyone, it's me, Alan Shival. We're here at London CubeCon for a special edition of the Text Drawing Gang.

So we've pulled together a special edition of the game. Let me introduce you quickly to who we've got here. I don't have to go around the country today.

They're all right here in person at my table from the far left. May not recognize him without any guitars. He is our, uh, what is he?

He's our future of VP analysts for DevOps. Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell.

Good to be here. Good to have you here. Representing the mile high.

Representing the mile high. The mile high in London. It's, it's not legal here.

Mitch, be careful. Oh, oh, good thing you told me that. Yep.

Next to Mitchell, he's still, he's watching the Yankee game on tape delay here, but he's our chief content officer. Mike Ard. Not Happy Yankee's dropped two in a Row trying to figure out what this rounder stuff is all about.

Ooh. Yeah. Okay.

It's the torpedo guy next to Mike. He's usually, uh, at home in Austin, but he's also here, live in London. Uh, VI Principal analyst, CTO and future Analyst Guy Courier.

Hey guy. That's a lot of titles. Good to be here.

They a lot of title. Yeah. Representing Open Carry here in London.

Open Carry in London. They don't have open carry in London. The police don't even have, between you and him, we're gonna need to hire guns, send guns, lawyers, and money.

Well, I think they circled this all up together. Corral us, you know, see if we get out of the country or not without, I'm afraid after my s**t says they're waiting for me when I get the passport on the way home. Exactly.

It's not so much getting out as getting back. Yeah. I may wind up in El Salvador, but back on a plane back, I think, I think our van is waiting for it sounds.

Geez. I make sure there's no mass man or anything. Anyway, look, I teased this Neo NIUs.

Neo NIUs. Mike, what are we talking about? So, the Linux Foundation, Europe, which is an arm of the Linux Foundation in the us I, I feel compelled to say it's an independent subsidiary that is based in Europe without US connections.

Or at least oversight. Yes. But anyway, they launched yet another foundation that they're calling the Neo NIUs Foundation, which is committed to helping organizations build their own data, sovereign IT platforms or cloud, as you might say, using open source technologies.

And it's being led mainly by, at least the two names you might recognize are SAP and Deutsche Telecom. And the whole goal of this thing is to ensure independence, as you said, from, and no dependency on any other country for technology. And I can't help but wonder if this is the first shot that will be heard around the world.

And we'll be seeing more of this. I, I think this is a c clean room version of a stack and, and of companies that are based here on the continent and, you know, on this side of the, of the pond that will not be subject to any American tariffs or, or, uh, export controls. And if you are Europe, you know, I watched, uh, Ursula Van, whatever, she's the head of, uh, the EU Chief Officer of eu, Ursula Van, I forget her name.

But it's clear if they're gonna, if, if the US is gonna, and not the whole us, if the US administration is gonna push this tariff issue, the Europeans are gonna do what they have to do to be independent. And, and I will remind you that from a population point of view, it's very close in size to the US from a, from a, uh, gt a g you know, gp, not GPR, gross National, G-D-P-G-D-P point of view. If you add it all up, it's not the us but it's still a sizable lock.

And I, I, I don't blame them for doing this. I, I think this is a prudent move on their part. I think guy, that everybody's gonna wind up doing this, but how far will it go?

I mean, will New York City declare its own stack and say, I don't want any components in Florida? Well, right. So sovereign, I wouldn't Cloud either.

Sovereign clouds have been around for a while. Yes. Right.

Okay. My initial take on this was not quite the geopolitical one. Yours is, but I think you're onto something.

Why? Well, so sovereign clouds have been around for a while. In fact, uh, Oracle in particular has been building sovereign clouds for various countries, um, or for healthcare in, you know, healthcare regions, that sort of thing.

Um, for quite some time. What's really interesting here is seeing the sovereign concept or the, so the sovereign architectures come into a very open source, very collaborative, very, let's say, democratically oriented community. That is significant.

I don't know if it's coincidence or reaction to the geopolitical situation, but, uh, Now who's being naive? Me? Um, or as some might say, neutral.

Okay. Um, I, but I'm lit. I'm literally no coincidence lit, literally.

I don't know. And I don't know if you know Alan, like, it, it's, it's, it's certainly something to accelerate at this point. So, So let's, let's talk about how fun this could get.

Do you think that open source maintainers and contributors in the United States would be legally prevented from contributing to this European project? Exactly. Or pork, The projects based on sovereignty.

There's the legal issue. There's also, I think the cultural issue, which is where I was getting at, which is this sort of thing of, of separate development or separated, you know, projects is a iCal to the entire open source enterprise. And so, uh, it is a shot across the bow, if you like, to the current geopolitical situation, whether coincidence or not, because it is an organization whose whole mindset for decades or, you know, uh, a culture whose mindset for decades has been one of sharing in collaboration, saying, whoa, not here.

We need to have our own thing. That's serious. That's an issue.

So I once had a rabbi give a sermon that coincidence is God's way of showing us he's alive. This is no coincidence. Let's, let's really be clear.

This was, this is something that was planned because what the US has done here has been planned. But it, it, this goes back to supply chains and covid, it goes back to the CHIP act. And it certainly goes to what's been coming outta Washington for the last three months.

If you are Europe or China or Japan or Korea or Mexico or Canada, you cannot count on anything being done in the US being available to you without strength. The same way, you know, we, we, we could you imagine if we produced all the chips in the world, what kind of blackmail would be going on if for company, for countries who wanted chips? You don't think that this can be done with software.

So I have more fun. Go Ahead. What country does Linus Tovo live in?

Hmm. Linus. Not the us.

Finland. Finland. Finland.

So, right. He's finished. So what happens when he wakes up one morning and decides to, like, maybe we need a little sovereignty control for Lennox too.

And maybe he says, Hey, you guys outside of this region, you know, you're on your own from now on. Just saying that as a theory. So, so here's where this, If you kind play this out this way, trade war, go.

Yeah. If you play this out, we go from sovereign clouds to S3, not Amazon, S3 AWS S3, but sovereign software stats, that's essentially what we're talking Yeah. Here's the software architecture for our national presence, whatever that domain is, it's in our interest, financially, security, whatever it is, military interest.

And you end up with all these variants of different stacks where today it's, you know, Kubernetes, yes, their distributions would still Kubernetes, but things start getting forked because we don't wanna share this with this country. I mean, it gets down this ridiculous Mass. It's, it it's counter to the open source project that A whole, yeah.

Yeah. Great guys. It it's bigger than mass.

Yeah. It is bigger. The World we all grew up in is the post World War II world, a world order actually established by the United States.

Like you had things like the United Nations and the anti tariff and free trade Acts, and the world, uh, uh, trade Council, WWTC and the world, uh, court, and all of these institutions that we've grown up that have brought in the greatest years of prosperity that humanity has ever established. That though there hasn't been total peace in the world, there's been less wars and killing in the last 80 years than ever in the history of humanities. You are talking about junking that whole world order, because one man might be a, a foreign agent of another country that, Well, it, so then you just brought it down to the specific Alan, I mean, like Yeah.

It Is very specific. That's what's going on here. Let, let's not get highfaluting Right.

People wax poetically about what the Nazi party was until they got taken away to the chambers. Yes. But this is a time of change.

It's a time of, actually, Mitch, you and I were using this word earlier when we were just talking about this show, this sort of, or I used it, which is this sort of chaotic moment. There's a lot of chaos. What we want to do, if we can, is orient everyone.

And that's why I'm glad that you brought that up, because Mike, you're talking about you implications, you talk about implications of this kind of move and how it can reverberate. But what you're doing for us, Alan, is you're putting it in this perspective that, that the world used to have a very protectionist approach to the economy that was pre-World War ii. In fact, it was, you know, something that happened a lot during the Great Depression as a reaction to the Great Depression.

And then It started before the Great crash. Yeah. And during World War II at Bretton Woods and, and what followed that, all of these economic moves to open up the world economy and ultimately led to the peak of globalization right before the Great Recession.

And I think this particular move, neo NIUs, this, this, this closing off, this walling off of an open source project is an example of a polling back all around the world led maybe by the United States and by the current administration, pulling back from globalization. And that's what we need to deal with. Whether it's just on technology stacks or it's on business or organizational goal.

We just need to develop a vaccine for new anus. Oh, those people aren't in, in the CDC anymore. Oh, that, that's not a cost to me.

So the whole thing does make me sad. It makes me sad. Let me be more blunt.

It's stupid. Not at the reaction, but the, the situation. I totally get why you would do this.

Yeah, yeah. It's true. I'd be like, Hey, if you're, if you're gonna be a wild, crazy fall off the end of the earth, we don't know which side.

'cause you think it's flat. Weaning is around. We're gonna build a round world.

You go live on your flat US earth. Right. Let me be clear, Don, Today, the eu tomorrow, the world.

Well, Yeah. I think the world is, and a lot of, to his point, has already done this. I think China has its own sovereign cloud kind of mindset in play.

And I think we're already seeing the balkanization of this whole structure. But, but I wonder the following. Go ahead.

Will people, individual people follow the rules or will they say, scurry, we're part of this open source community. It's bigger than all of you countries, and we're gonna work together whether you like it or not. Unless you're gonna come and actually arrest me for writing code.

They got plenty of mass met. Yeah. Apparently they'll pick you up off the street.

So Yeah. With, With mass Met fingers off the keyboard. I don't know why not.

Look, I, I think you're right. We're in a little bit of a chaos time, but a new nature of poors, a vacuum. Mm-hmm.

And a new world order will emerge, may be without the us certainly without the US at its health Action. There's an opposite and equal reaction. Right.

Naton, you could see China. Oh, filling that vacuum. Mm-hmm.

Partnering with the eu. I think they already are. I think, I think globalization may have died.

And what we're gonna be left with is a lot of international instances of companies. So I'm gonna have, you know, 10 different arms of the same company that are gonna all have different infrastructure because, you know, one's in this unit's in Europe and my other unit of Chevron, for example, is in the us and then I got another one in Venezuela or whatever. People, Here's the thing, people in countries want to trade.

China's gonna do business with Europe. Japan is gonna do business with Europe. Europe's gonna do business with South Korea.

Africa will, they need aid. They're gonna do a lot of business with China and Europe. People who are giving them vaccines.

Yes. Vaccines work. So what you are risking here, Um, Is really the us being a, uh, a rogue nation after all these years of calling North Korea Red Nation.

And it, it Gets worse if, and we're threatening that slap tariffs on countries that are trading with other countries that we slap tariffs on. So it's just gonna escalate outta control. I think that that is the bigger, the balkanization is an immediate like that.

But that I think is a intermediate step towards the emergence of a new world order. Plain it simple. So I think we're, we're entering into a phase of us could look like China 20, 30 years ago.

You wanted to do business in our country. Come build your factory in our country. Maybe the government won't own a little bit of it and we'll put the, uh, you know, Alan Shimmel za of Yeah.

Partnerships with the US government on your board. Right? I mean, as, I don't wanna be too extremists, but I mean, ultimately, if, if you really wanna say close the border, close the walls, build the wall, right?

That's what we look like. 'cause we look like China. And it, it's hard to imagine how this all has an outcome that's better for anybody.

Well that, so that when you say it makes you sad, that's the sad part. Who are the losers here? We all are.

We all are. Yeah. You know, when I was a little boy Just yesterday, Just yesterday, When you were thinking about globalization and No, I wouldn't think about globalization and software, but, you know, I'd watch Star Trek and what a wonderful world.

You had the Russian guy Check off Chek off. Yeah. You had the Japanese fellow Sulu.

Yeah. I didn't buy into the Vulcan thing. I'll tell you the truth.

I didn't think we'd have aliens. But the idea of a world that comes together to do good things to, to that, you know, cure cancer kind of stuff, and explore space and break, you know, do things. I just wanna remind you, even in Star Trek, they had the red shirts.

They were the one that got sacrificed. The Guys so, well, the security guys always got sacrificed. Exactly.

I thought they were engineers. Yes, I know. That's, I'm trying to not Say that.

Thank you. I didn't wanna tell 'em that. Thank You very much.

It's personal, but you know, it's a shame that what instead we're gonna have is just a race of, of all these nationalities, countries, territories, regions, trading blocks competing against each other. And I don't, I know that's what the present US administration may want, but it's not what's good for you, Matt. And, and we will reinvent the same tech 10 times over for 10 different sovereign clouds.

Yeah. Each will be done slightly differently. And then One of the things that you asked was, are people gonna follow the rules?

Okay. No, they're not gonna follow the rules. We know they're not all gonna follow the rules.

The sad part is the friction that this kind of, this this broad organizational action, whether it's a government action or in this case, a, a, a non-governmental organization or even of a large company, that, that kind of action that puts friction into development, it puts friction into the collaboration. It makes it more difficult. So, and, and then, you know, of course this is the mother of all forks, right?

Like now you have all kinds of like, comparisons and, and oh, they're doing this. Maybe we should do it. Do we recreate it?

Where do we get it from? Like that, that, yeah. Increase in chaos.

There will be an underground software development community that will be actively resisting and they, they will prefer to work together. I Hope so. Someone in Russia will still be American code for Kubernetes.

And we'll get something that looks like really close to a Kubernetes in Russia. Just like the space shuttle and the, the Russian version of it. I'm serious.

You know, think about intellectual property, right? We, yes, there's laws between countries and we deal with that issue today. It's not like it is with time where it's like open season on anybody's lightning, intellectual poverty.

They're great at poppy stuff. That's what they do really well. Is that, is that a future that we're headed towards where I don't give a crap.

It's, you know, it breakdown of the world. What, so what you guys are talking about is world order. See, it's the breakdown of the world's order and everything that that goes with, right?

Geneva conventions, uh, international court of justice, war crimes. I'm going to, I'm gonna steal code too, right? More aggressively.

I mean, there's gonna be more espionage because people are gonna be like, there are, it's gonna be like, I remember I'm in, uh, in Germany and I'm walking down and through this, uh, military museum they have. And I turned the corner and there's a, um, a VAX computer system. It was a knockoff of the one that digital built back in the day.

And the East Germans then reversed engineered it and built their own. And that's how they kind of did it. And we're just gonna see more and more of that.

We still theirs. I will say this. You said globalism is dead or something like that?

Globalization. Yeah. It's not dead.

It's going into hibernation. These things swing back and forth. I, I hope so.

So I hope so. It, it could be dead as far as we're concerned because maybe the return will be, you know, after we're done and gone. Well, The thing about a return is you never build a supply chain the same way it was when it was, you can't, you can't.

Same thing with, you're not gonna build the same world order that we have today, or globalization that we have today. It'll be something different. Maybe it'll have some of the characteristics of it, but we won't Return to that.

Maybe in the next segment we'll talk about how AI is gonna save us. I think that's, what do you say? That's who our overlord is.

Actually. The oligarchs are already trying to take over ai. They already have.

I'd like to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and green. Okay, let's take a break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna be back.

And what are we talking about, Mike? Talking about the latest cloud native computing foundation. Research on adoption of technologies like Kubernetes Seems so mundane compared to this, but we're watching Techstrong.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back in the cloud Native computing foundation.

CNCF, the host of this fabulous event that we're at puts out their annual researcher, I think it's now semi-annual. And they're talking about, well, adoption of cloud native technologies in Kubernetes in particular. Now, it might come to you as a surprise that a lot of folks have Kubernetes clusters as that survey, but there was a couple interesting points in here that I think will get your attention.

One is 24% said that all of their application development and deployment now is cloud native. Like, no, like that's heading up to a rapid point. And then the growth rate of organizations that were adopting CICD platforms year over year increased 31%.

So there's clearly a fundamental shift happening in the way software is built. And we've been talking about this for years in terms of, it's coming, but I feel like looking at the research data, it's here in spades now. And then the question becomes this, how long will it be before the number of workloads that I'm running is greater than in the number of cloud native workloads I'm running is greater than my legacy monolithic workloads.

And then at what point do I shift the way I think about managing it? Because up until now, like the Kubernetes clusters people were in the corner over there somewhere managing this stuff with a DevOps team on their own. And if this stuff starts to go mainstream, the whole IT world is gonna be different.

Well, keep in mind we're, we're rebuilding. It's kind of, Kubernetes is flowing upstream. We're re and cloud native.

We're rebuilding the tool chains and the workflows into cloud native technologies that we then develop software on top of. So we're now leveraging the, you know, kind of eating our own dog food, if you will. So it, it, it isn't just that so many people are adopting you adopting CICV, like we have some other previous research that said, how many CICD platforms do you have or products?

Are you still looking to replace those? Actually the numbers, you're pretty high on people looking to replace what they have as well as look for new. But I think underlying all this is how do you move everything onto a Kubernetes based workflow, uh, substrate that supports all of this so that that changes fundamentally all the scripts and all the, you know, bailing wire and gum we use to patch things together to make it work.

Not discounting or the quality of it. You know what I'm saying? And there's, there's another hidden gem in the CNCF numbers.

So we talk about CICD, like it's one thing, but increasingly people who are running into Kubernetes are going, CI and CD are separate. They're like, the CI scripts that we use don't really work in a declarative Kubernetes environment where you're trying to continuously update it. So you're seeing the rise of things like Argo as a separate CD platform that's loosely coupled to ci.

But this notion of using CI scripts to drive CD is, as far as they're concerned, dead. You don't deploy automatic, most companies don't go straight from CI into deployment. You had 43% of people of organizations are still using Jenkins for CI ICD.

Alright, That's A large shot. That may me, that may be a, what do you call that? A trailing indicator.

Yeah. Yes. But, but here's the thing.

What is the thing? Here's the thing. Um, this to me is not radical or news.

This is pure crossing the casso, right? We were at that 15% early adopter stage for, shoot, Atlanta's 10 years of cube con. We've been at that early adopter stage for eight or nine years.

Sure. And now we've crossed from 15% to 24 20 5%, which means we're just at the beginning of the early main street, not the later main street. We still have a lot more to go.

Yeah. To, to go to quote Churchill. It's the end of the beginning.

Is that what the End of the beginning or the beginning, but not the beginning of the end. Right? Well, let's, let's not, let's not conflate Kubernetes and, you know, uh, DevOps and that sort of thing.

Right? So, so unless the study says so, um, and you're the expert on the study at this point. Not, not out of, outside of the CNCF.

My point is this, I think it was five, six years ago, Google demonstrated hosting a four terabyte database in a continuum. And, and, and, and, and some level of mobility. I mean four terabytes when you have a certain, especially six years of, um, there's a lot of, or let's say, I shouldn't say a lot.

There's certainly a movement more towards hosting everything within containers and Kubernetes. I think That's the Be for because of the operational fluidity it provides. Yeah.

And if it's a monolith or an ancient monolith or whatever it is. I mean, that's one of the nice things about, about containers is that you can create them in the, you know, to meet the specifications that you need, provide the infrastructure can support it. And you can go with that.

So I have more fun on that though. So Red Hat is over here talking about this. So you're talking about staple applications in containers running my, you can run 'em on Kubernetes and those are like databases and that kind of stuff.

And, um, that's gained a fair amount of traction in the last few years. But now Red Hats go over there saying, Hey, you know, all these AI workloads out there, they behave radically differently from all the existing database structures that are out there. And the way we've been managing data needs to fundamentally change and it's gonna be a lot more dynamic.

And their point was, we're not prepared to manage data at that level of dynas. I agree With that. And occurrence, right?

Oh, data gravity has been a serious issue for, well, we ization and we Talked about data as gravity. And I think the point is, data and code are kind of now intermixed, right? When you talk about LLMs and, uh, or machine learning for that matter.

'cause you're grooming algorithms, you're grooming data for the algorithms, it has a different kind of frequency that it operates in terms of developing that and pushing it out through a pipeline and into production that doesn't quite fit the software iterative pipeline in the same way. So I think we've got some, like how do you make these two frequencies work together? 'cause they do need to coincide with some deployment at different times.

But I think to your point, is the data that we're driving us from, whether it's fronted and in RAG or it's in the back backend in models or sub secondary databases, we we're getting ready for that to take the next level of expansion, explosion, the amount of data that we're accessing And, and managing. That's gonna be like a freaking nightmare. We're not quite ready for.

So First of all, let me say this, the adoption rate for DevOps, I think is much higher. Oh, very nice. Than the adoption Rate for Cloud Native.

Yeah. Secondly, one of the themes, you know, I've been stuck here at this table doing interview after interview after interview now for two days. Poor you.

I feel bad for you. It's Hard, especially in these chairs. But that being said, a theme that I've heard over and over again for the people I've spoken to is that managing Kubernetes at scale is the issue of the day here.

Yes. Do that. Yeah.

Right. And we have a, you know, Microsoft's coming out with a Windows interface for it. This one's coming out with an AI for it.

These guys behind me here got another thing. Everybody wants to be able to manage Kubernetes at scale tells me two things. Number one, no one really has a great solution, otherwise these other ones would go away.

And number two, sorry, number two, it's a real problem. That's the problem. Yeah.

And I would say, what's the greatest obstacle for that 24% to turn to 77% managing Kubernetes at scale? I, I do not disagree, but I do feel like I have been like, uh, in a, in a play like waiting for Gadot for Kubernetes now for like eight years, and It's finally starting to, I'm like, Hey, you know, how you doing? I Feel like, well, we've gone from, You know, that play would be completely ruined if they'll ever showed it up.

We've gone from Kubernetes is something you do for cloud native applications, right? And initially microservices, now it's any kind of workload, but it's really become part of the infrastructure layer. The, the, the stack.

That's the infrastructure. That's one of the things I see here. Um, we've talked about like, how big can C**n get?

How big can CNCF yet it feels like, to me there's really kind of two, let's talk about infrastructure. Because infrastructure, people want to create things that you could build and run anything on, right? And you got developers that like, I want to abstract that away.

I wanna do the things that I wanna do, whether it's AI or the latest software architecture. And it's kind of conflating those two things together in one show. It, you don't usually have one company that does both.

There are some, you know, the Opus Tax plus development tools. There are some, but a lot of it is like, which bit do you go to? Are you a red or a Green?

So this new, this new, uh, joining of, um, the Open Infrastructure Foundation with the Linux Foundation, I think it's a reaction in some ways to, Uh, the open infrastructure. The infra in Yeah, yeah, yeah. Infra is now an arm of the Linux Foundation.

Right? Yeah, no, I know that. Yeah.

But it's the K CloudStack people. I use the full name. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. K CloudStack opens.

Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Um, OpenStack, Yeah. The on stage this morning at the show, at the keynotes on the, the Apple engineer who was part of a little discussion with, with, with Engineer Francisco and one from, um, Zoey, um, she highlighted multi, multi cluster management and infrastructure positioning, uh, uh, provisioning, sorry.

As two areas that need, that need attention and investment. Right? Yeah.

And it's really interesting. You, you're, you're echoing something that's been on my mind, um, especially during this show, but for a little while. Which is, which is the, the, I mean, we, we talk about this, we think about this and a, a cloud native.

We think of it in developer and application development terms. But weren't you just saying to me that, that there's just so much focus here on infrastructure, infrastructure, operations, infrastructure management. Mm-hmm.

And it's important. It just, that's a whole different domain than building applications, whether it's with AI or not, You know. No, but infrastructure, sexy again, we, we see it.

That's why we launched Techstrong. It absolutely. Yeah.

Infrastructure Sexy is Being remade now Kubernetes and Absolutely. I I always thought it was good looking myself, but Yeah. I was gonna say, I need you To hire sex again.

Like, Like we're finally having Infrastructure week. That's what you saying. Let's, this is infrastructure.

We're gonna take a break before Mike gets himself in trouble. We're here at Q Con, we've got more tech Drunk gang. Hold on.

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All right, folks, we're back with our third block. And as we discussed earlier, technology is not immune from cultural issues. And we're here at CubeCon and people are talking about DEI initiatives and things like that.

And you would think that this being in Europe, that, you know, none of these issues would find their way here based on what's going on in the us. But lo and behold, we're having a bit of a controversy here over this. And Alan, walk us through it.

So I am the social conscious of the gang, aren't you? You are. Oh, thank God.

Somebody Is. Thank God. Anyway, here, here's where I am on this.

And you guys could agree with me or not. You're all free to take your own opinion, whether it's politically correct in the US or not. DEI is the right thing to do for a lot of reasons.

All one has to do is walk around this conference of 12,000 plus people or any other tech conference to see why we need DEI. Why is it 80% white males as the four of us here are? Why don't I have a person of color here?

Why don't I have a woman here? 'cause I couldn't find one. DEI is a need.

That's real. And it's not, frankly, just in tech, it's in, it's in so much. It, it's so, there's so much that's been done in our culture over the hundreds of thousands of years that there's a reason why we do it.

However, in in the US at least we've decided this is no longer a worthy, a worthy Objective. It's no longer a worthy goal. And I say in the us, not in the entire us, for quite the US GO has decided this.

And so they ev shoot, not congress, mind you, not to the judicial branch, but the executive branch has put out some executive orders, which are ob dubious enforceability, that to remove all references to DEI in our education, in our public works, in our government websites and so forth. And what they've done, let's face it, it's been frankly disgusting. Our educational, they out heroes of this country because they were black or women firing career long military people because they were blacker women and they decided they weren't good enough for the role.

That's nonsense. But it gets worse. 'cause what they've done is they're pressuring American companies to go along with this brown shirt fascism and it reared its head here in Europe.

Mm-hmm. At this conference. At this conference, because the CNCF has always promoted DEI, they have four or five groups within that DEI umbrella that they promote.

One is the heart of hearing and deaf people. We've interviewed them here. Amazing group of people.

The, uh, LI always get my initials wrong, I apologize. L-G-B-T-Q community, like we're still fighting about this. Get outta people's bedrooms.

Number three, women, why don't we have more women in tech and number four, people of color and other minorities. Again, one just has to look around here to see for yourself what it's about. Now, it's one thing if you've got a bad apple in government who's doing it, but when you start using that as leverage to pressure companies, it's trouble.

As I said, now they have a DEI meeting here of the DEI group, and folks at the meeting are told they're not allowed to take a picture of Google's logo because though Google paid money to sponsor that DEI thing, I guess that came in before they got their marching orders from their furor in chief, they gave the word that they didn't want their logo or named used or associated with DEI. Shame, shame on Google, shame on you. You were willing to write the check, but you won't have your name on it.

What does that make you? What does that make you? That's terrible.

But it goes beyond that. Some of the folks in that community wrote to the CNCF and said, we need you now. We need you to come forward and say we support DEI initiatives.

Crickets. Crickets from the CNCF and Linux Foundation. Shame on you.

Shame on the Linux Foundation. Shame on CNCF for not coming forward and saying, yes, we support our DEI initiatives. We support our communities.

It goes beyond here though, and technology, the biggest law firms in our country, and you know, lawyers, you know lawyers, I know lawyers. We know kowtowing give in. That's when we fight.

The biggest law firms in our country have, rather than incur the wrath of, of our totalitarian government, have decided to do tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono legal work to further the aims of this administration, rather than given the DEI. And these law firms were picked specifically called out by eo, which generally it a portal. Yeah.

But yeah, but generally when you call out a specific firm, not a class, it gets thrown out court. If you have a real court and they've decided to just bend the knee, I'm telling you, this is Germany, 1933. If you don't stand up and speak out, you're not gonna have a chance to do it late later.

We need the leaders of our co corporations. We need our tech giant corporations. We need our leaving law firms.

We need each and every one of you to stand up and speak out. You think you lost a job to someone because they were a, a woman or a person of color? Perhaps you did, but I guarantee you that those people and their people have been through more.

But if we don't stand up and speak out and we let this administration intimidate and bully and run over what makes America, America, we will have no America. And so I'm, I'm up in arms about this. Yeah.

My point on it too is like, it's extending into the corporate world where these companies should have the right to do what they wanna do. Absolutely. And, And they're clearly feeling intimidated into one step versus another.

And it's one thing for the administration to do what it's doing, I wouldn't agree with it, but at least, you know, they ran on that and there's no surprise there. But on the side where they're like now extending that out to individual corporations to pressure then to behave a certain way is as they say here, beyond the pale. Absolutely.

Can I, can I back this up a little? Go ahead. To the DEI question.

This is a personal issue to me. Um, so it's even worse how you characterize it was as an anti DEI initiative by our current, by the current United States administration, because that's how the administration characterizes. But what is it really?

What is it really? It is a, it is a statement that anyone who wants to, to accuse and be suspicious about someone who is not like them getting a job, getting an honor, getting promoted, getting an opportunity. If they wanna blame that on that person's background, they're now allowed, they're allowed to do that.

Mm-hmm. Okay. That's what this is about.

It is, it's not Really eliminating DEI because it's not needed anymore, or because it's prejudicial against a group or any of that other sort of thing. It's so that when, when someone like myself in my position can go and say to themselves, I wanted that. I didn't get it, look who got it.

It must be because of their background. It must be because of whom they were born as it must be because of their feelings or their position. Yeah.

I am getting official support for that. Not just official support. I'm getting the power to go and say, take them out.

The problem is With that, that's, that's, that's, that's poisonous. That's poisonous. It's something It's, it's its poisonous Anti everything That We, it's poisonous to, you know, to American, the American brand.

Yeah. So I think The problem is that we've elevated it to a top level political issue. Like abortion became a top level political issue in the eighties.

Right. In it, in a polarized America. Now meritocracy is used as the, as the opposite of DEI though you can't have a, a meritocracy if you have DEI.

So we must have to get rid of DEI. That's the, you know, the blame factor. And it, it's, to me, it's, it's kind of the fighting back of, you can talk about whether it's white males or racist or what, what might all be behind it.

But I think it's really part of tearing down the infrastructure, tearing down the norms of our society in advances that we've made, and creating the chaos that you talked about at this conference that's happening, you know, in our political world and even and in our lives, in our work lives. So it's just, I mean, I don't really give a s**t what the government thinks about. If I like DERI or not the president of our, whatever company I work for, I hope they don't really give a s**t either.

But the problem is the tech bros have stepped in and said, oh, great, let's change our policy around monitoring, you know, and not, and we've been, we've been too aggressive about monitoring the content on our sites. That's b******t. They're, they're just pow owing to either curry favor or avoid consequences from the government.

That's Not right. Yeah. And I want everyone to be suspicious about the story that is being told, or the stories that are being told, the reasons and justifications being given.

When we repeat that language, we can, we can, even if we are arguing against it, we are allowing that story to continue. Understood. The story here is, I grew up thinking I deserved something.

I'm not getting it Saying It's not my fault. It's not my fault. Yeah.

And, and, and let's be realistic. There are lots of things that you deserve that you don't get no matter what your background is. That's life.

See, his point though, the meritocracy that we're talking about is stacked, right? It's leaning into a particular viewpoint that says, you know, and this is our definition of merit meritocracy, Not really a meritocracy. We A Meritocracy, Right?

Not a meritocracy fire, a four star general to bring a three star general into a job that's only available to four star generals. Because the four star general was black and the three star guy is out of central casting according to the idiot in Chief Mitchell, I've never heard you curse on text drunk gang before, so I know how upset this, this makes. No, I'm, yeah, it is.

It's, it's, I think we're, I think we're destroying the fabric of our society of what makes us human. And we're now, we're demonizing people for whatever reason you choose. Maybe we should just stay here and not go home.

Maybe. But wait, but, but this only exists because I don't even think the people who are saying it believe it. They just know that they can get votes saying it.

They can get votes. Well, no, I think ultimate think, believe there. People who believe it.

I think this one, they believe Mike, they believe, I think there are lots of things they don't believe that they say. But again, I think this one, the, the key here is stand up, speak out. If you don't stand up and speak out about this, you're guilty by association.

Do it might be gone. And, and I'll close it with this, and I closed my shimmy says with this day I had the writing. I don't have it in front of me now, but you know, that old quote when they came for so and so, I wasn't them, so I didn't say anything.

Yeah. And when they came, the next one, and until they came for me and there was no one. Yeah, I'll leave it with that.

All right. Textron gang, we're live in Q Con. We'll be here tomorrow.

I'm done.